Here was my earlier post on the topic, now Ban Chuan Cheah is kind enough to send me questionnaire data from the World Values Survey. The question is:
With which of these two statements do you tend to agree? (CODE ONE ANSWER ONLY)
A. Regardless of what the qualities and faults of one’s parents are, one must always love and respect them.
B. One does not have the duty to respect and love parents who have not earned it by their behaviour and attitudes.1. Always
2. Earned
3. Neither
Some rates of answering "Always" are:
Netherlands: 31.9 percent, Denmark: 35.9, Germany: 59.2, Belarus: 70.9, Japan: 71.6, France: 74.7, United States: 77.2, Canada: 77.6, India: 88.8, China: 94.5, Puerto Rico: 97.5, Vietnam: 99.3.
Based on these and other numbers, I tentatively conclude that wealth breeds parental disrespect, being Asian brings greater respect for parents, and having a strong welfare state is correlated with disrespect for parents. Being a former East Bloc totalitarian state doesn’t have nearly the oomph I would have expected; many East European countries fall into the 70-80 percent range.
I’ll Translate this and send it to my parents. Just to let them get the point it’s not just me. Thanks MR
Sam (Dutch)
Could someone match these results up with Gini Coefficients?
How do you know that it’s not the other way around: parental disrespect breeds wealth?
Or maybe countries with more closely related cultural heritage are more likely to a) have similar levels of wealth, b) have similar distribution of answers to this question.
Correlation doesn’t mean causation? I was surprised to see you make that hypothesis. Or maybe, the better your chances for social mobility the more the parents have to earn your respect?
Also the US more than any of the above countries is a hodgepodge of cultures – I would guess the breakdown percentages for the USA’s answers would vary dramatically based on region of the country, how many generations American you are, etc.
Caped Crusader, China scored among the highest as far as mandatory parental respect goes, and it is a decidedly non-religious nation. Same might go for Vietnam, but I’m no expert.
I suspect that this is primarily cultural — West vs. East. This perhaps reflects the Western tradition of reason and rationality and the legacy of the Enlightenment.
To the extent that there is causality with wealth it’s that countries that prize reason and rationality also tend to have the foundations of a more prosperous economy.
I don’t believe the answer to this question would be highly related to behavior. Are children in Denmark really running wild, or do they read this question as “my parents right or wrong”? A sentiment liberal, thinking people tend to disagree with.
(Alternatively, maybe the question is really an indicator of how much parents in each
country are worthy of respect!)
A more accurate picture would be to measure actual behavior, but what is a good measure of “respect”? This too differs by culture.
I suspect children in China feel greater moral obligations to their parents, but I suspect Americans are more likely to sincerely consider their parents as friends.
The word “respect” is ambiguous in English. It can mean “defer to” or it can mean “admire, esteem”. If a modern woman is happily married, should she “respect” her husband?
Very often an ambiguous word in one language has no corresponding equally ambiguous word in another language. Instead, you must choose between two unambiguous translations, with different meanings.
Pollsters know that even small, seemingly innocuous changes in the wording of a question can produce very large differences in the response. So what happens when you translate into a different language entirely?
Obviously some of the differences are real — China’s Confucian heritage, for instance — but still, this sort of transnational polling in multiple languages must be taken with a very, very big grain of salt.
Yet another lame survey. Any question with “always” in it is just stupid. To channel Godwin, if your dad were Hitler, would you still have to love and respect him? Or, slightly less dramatically, if he physically, emotionally, and sexually abused you from birth until you escaped the home, how ’bout then?
I am from Denmark. I have worked as a teacher since 1970, so I know a little bit about childrens behaviour.
Most children want to love and respect their parents, but Denmark is a very egalitarian society, so you don’t have love and respect because of who you are but rather because of how you act.
All children loves their parents, and sometimes also without any reason, but not all children respect their parents (or their teachers), if they don’t act in a way so that they deserve it.
That is healthy, I think.
Too much respect for authorities often ends up in supporting dictatorship. A slogan like “Right or wrong – my country” is a good example of misguided respect.
A good citizen must dare to ask the inconvenient question. That doesn’t mean that he loves less, often more actually, because he/she dares to take the necessary conflicts also if it causes pain.
Don’t confuse respect with submission.
Mogens
A major flaw of international surveys like this one, besides those mentioned above, is that words such as “love” and (especially) “respect” often can’t be translated across different languages with full accuracy. Of course, the dictionary will list one or more words that mean more or less the same, but the actual mental images evoked by such “literal” translations among speakers of different languages can be very different. This can be the case even for speakers of the same language coming from a different cultural background.
I think your reference to strong welfare states lacks facts, because France is also a strong welfare state, but it has a high respect for parents. Canada also has a bigger welfare state than the US and is on par. I don’t think this is necessarily related to welfare statism, but rather to cultural norms.
“Are children in Denmark really running wild[...]”
Funny you should ask that, considering the violence among “youths” in Copenhagen during the last year:
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=341702007
I believe that children who have always been given everything they want are the type of children to grow up expecting things from their parents not thankfully accepting the gift just taking it like they deserve it. Parents who do not have the money to buy whatever their children want have the type of child that is truly thankful for the gift when they do receive one. They are not brought up to just expect things they are brought up to be thankful when they are given something.
B seems to be the most realistic answer because its not the kids fault if the parents don’t have any respect for their children. Im sure in the U.S. society, children treat their parents with the most respect because i think wealth plays a major role in it.
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