Parenting priorities: international attitudes towards raising children

Changing attitudes to parenting mean the UK public now rank among the lowest internationally for the importance they place on obedience or responsibility in children, and among the highest for how much they value unselfishness, good manners and imagination, a new study shows. The research, by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, finds the share of Britons who think obedience is an especially important quality for children to learn at home has decreased dramatically since the late 1990s. But at the same time, there has been a large increase in the proportion who say hard work is particularly important for children, with this now ranking as the UK’s fourth most important quality out of the 11 asked about in the research. And while the vast majority of Britons have consistently said it is especially important for children to have good manners, this has declined in importance elsewhere, particularly in the US, where good manners are now valued the least out of 24 countries included in the research. On several traits, Britons’ views vary little by generation – with the exception of Gen Z, who stand out as least likely to say tolerance for other people and good manners are essential qualities in children. And more broadly, of the countries included in the study, only two are less likely than the UK to believe there is a duty to have children, or that adult children have a duty to care for their parents, while the UK is among the most likely to say it is unjustifiable for parents to beat children. The analysis was carried out as part of the World Values Survey (WVS), one of the largest and most widely used academic social surveys in the world, with some questions dating as far back as 1981.