How do your political views develop from how you were raised?

Firist modern political debate, Kennedy and Nixon

Behavioral scientists recognize that people learn what they live and that child-rearing patterns produce behaviors that can continue later in life. Children are said to model their parents' behavior and to develop in certain ways as they are taught. So how does that child-rearing affect political choice?.

Experts tell us there are four patterns of child rearing that shape behavior.  These behaviors then become the cornerstone of an adult's future life, including how successful he or she may be and how an individual will think and behave in relationship to other people.

Children who are given strict rules learn to expect them. They value discipline and knowing good limits and often end up wanting to raise their children in the same way they were brought up. Strict definitions of rules that are said to be important lead people to define their world in terms of rules and laws and ways to behave that are said to be part of tradition.

The Republican Party emphasizes the Constitution, the rules, the need to have defined order and the importance of tradition in life. Those who have led their lives by these same rules as children find it comfortable to be within a political party where the rules of behavior are defined and where they can feel safe that those around them can be trusted to follow the same rules.

Those who lived by rules that were understood, yet changed when new things happened in families, and where information was explained as opposed to the message, "just listen and obey" are likely to want the same flexibility in adult life. This means rules might be important but can be broken if there is a new event that requires a different set. Democrats pride themselves on understanding change and being able to work within it as time and events bring new and important information where people must make adjustments. The child who has been taught to do that will choose a political party where those same behaviors are found.

Authority, who has it and how it is used is another way people learn to define themselves in childhood. The father in charge of a family who has unqualified authority and who exercises it with a strong hand will have a child who seeks a parent figure who has the same type of characteristics for leadership. The child who has a strong father in authority will want a political leader with the same characteristics,often Republican as well for that reason.

The person who has parents who share authority and where decisions are made through collaboration come to seek that same collaboration in how they conduct their lives. So the "big tent" of Democrats where negotiation takes time because of differences isn't as uncomfortable for those people where parents sometimes negotiated, or even verbally battled, over differences.

A nurturing parent who disciplines with a voice not the back of a hand often ends up with a child who wants to talk, negotiate and reach understanding, according to the experts. Politics that emphasize e a caring, nurturing pattern, reflected by social concerns for the poor, elderly, disabled and the underdog in general appeal to those individuals who were raised themselves in a caring, nurturing home where parents talked about sharing and caring for others.  Social liberalism defines the Democratic Party, according to social scientists and students of history, particularly in the 20th century.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt is one of those politicians who represents that social liberalism, as his programs to help the underprivileged and his New Deal ideas were oriented towards helping others in a nurturing way, and a way that said society has a responsible to care for its members who have less prilege than others. And FDR himself was raised in that nurturing style that is said to create the social liberal.  His mother was particularly nurturing in her raising of FDR, according to biographers,as she doted over him much of his life, including when he was President.

In the modern family parents often exchange roles, with the father and mother assuming different responsibilities at different times, according to the American Psychological Association.  Still there are differences in child-rearing according to the region of the country where the family resides that will also impact political views. For example, in the South the father often still retains the role as head of the family.  Rules are important, as reflected by the South's legislation that controls personal behavior.  And spanking as a form of discipline is still favored, including the physical discipline by teachers to enforce the rules, as observed in an article about child rearing and child education in Texas.  Still in most American families there has been some shift in how decisions are made within the modern family and a mixed style of how children are encouraged or disciplined, where one might receive a spanking one day or conversation about a behavior the next.. These patterns lead to behaviors where flexibility and independence are required and where this same type of independence and flexibility becomes the hallmark of the behavior and needs of the child as he or she grows up.  These are the people who often become the political Independents.

Political pundits agree that voter apathy is an ongoing concern.  Much of that apathy may come from a fourth pattern of child raising.  That pattern involves parents who are not that involved in the child's rearing, who don't set rules and who are not responsive to a child's needs. Children who are raised with this style have a higher rate of social problems than others and are therefore apt to have those same patterns incorporated into social and political behaviors.  They won't or can't vote, or they may be changeable depending upon emotions at the time.

Those who want to shape politics might examine the behavioral principles involved in how attitudes are shaped from child rearing practices, as these may make a difference in how people vote.  And the problem of voter apathy can also be examined from the standpoint of child-rearing practices as well, so that at the core behaviors can be shaped to encourage voter participation by encouraging parental participation with children in their developmental years.   Because how a child is raised, like a tree that is bent, will determine how he or she will grow and become the adult who helps to shape a nation.

How politics shapes our behaviors, creates negative models for children

Kitchen Debate--Nixon and Kruschev

Carol Forsloff—-What’s in and what’s out in terms of what we think, act, and do is often influenced by our local and national politics. Although most people say they shun partisan notions, they end up being influenced by them at the same time, mirroring what they see and hear in the way political leaders interact. One of the biggest potential threats to the culture has to do with how our behaviors serve as negative models for our children and our future as a society.

Presently the United States Congress is deadlocked over the budget and Obama care. Both sides of the debates have often taken a “win at any cost” approach to problem resolution. This strategy, although said to be thought of negatively by the majority of Americans, nevertheless offers to everyone a model for interaction that spills over into other situations where people are divided about a situation or event.

In past eras, political debates shaped our attitudes for many years concerning how we perceived other nations, as well as how we saw ourselves. The Kitchen Debates between former President Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev offered a heated exchange between two national leaders on the issues related to communism vs. capitalism. Although the debate became somewhat pronounced in delivery from both Kruschev and Nixon, there was at the same time a gentleman’s agreement that the behavior not escalate out of control. This was the model of behavior for the 1950’s, when appearing proper, while still being political, was part of the social and political behavior at the time. Still Nixon’s pointed arguments about Communism became the perception of most Americans about how that form of government was an unfair system that took away personal freedoms. The lasting effect is the continuing debate over matters like health care as reflecting a Communist style.

Condominium maintenance and management provides an arena for quarrels to take place, especially when there are necessary repairs. Hostilities erupt in much the same manner we see politicians debate, with neither side willing to listen to the other or read anything that disagrees with a point of view held as dear as a political argument.

In a local condominium community in Oregon, the scene of Congress wrangling provides an unintentional pattern of how individuals make decisions about repairs vs. capital improvements on units found by experts to have extensive damage. The community has taken sides, with many individuals apathetic because of the anger and frustration, simply letting others take the responsibility for debate or decision. One side of the community debate includes Board members as well as members of the community who believe the experts who have evaluated the project to be correct in the judgment that repairs, although expensive, have to be done immediately. The other side of the debate represents people opposed to the project, some because they don’t want to spend the money to fix the buildings, some because they don’t have the money to do it and still others because they seek to control the project by controlling the decisions of others. On either side of the arguments about the need to take action, but divided over the process of how to do it, the groups have scarcely changed in attitudes, regardless of evidence presented at meetings or even in court.

In the case of the present arguments over the debt ceiling, what some call entitlements as well as Obamacare, each side has the same intractable approach, where neither side is willing to take action that interrupts their interpretation of the problems and their approach to resolving them. Instead acrimony and division has grown so significantly, that the arguments have spilled over into personal interactions between individuals who were at one time friendly and sociable and are now angry and sometimes abusive in the way they interact with one another.

Those who don’t participate in the political arguments claim one side has as many problems as the other, so they don’t take sides. Similarly the apathetic, disinterested and those wanting to appear agreeable with everyone, sit out the discussions with the notions that each side in the controversy, in this case about a condo community’s needs and financial concerns, has good and bad arguments, so no one can make a decision since they don’t know how to judge the right from the wrong. Even a judge’s decision, given after a trial involving a lawsuit, declaring the major repairs were indeed necessary and not capital improvements as the plaintiff’s faction had claimed, brought no change among the apathetic or the fearful among community members.

Is this pattern widespread or an isolated reflection of what is happening in the rest of the country?
It is more likely than not a way we have learned to interact with each other, modeling what we see, as experts remind us that’s how we learn. The worst of it is our children grow up learning those patterns, so the need to make effective, balanced, and honest resolutions in kind and caring manners becomes even more important when we understand we live what we learn from others. And modeling behavior, as mental health experts declare, has long-lasting effects. In that case, when the worst thing happens, we have only ourselves to blame for not honoring evidence and instead separating into intractable positions that serve only to bring harm to ourselves..