What qualities should children learn at home?

What qualities do Europeans think children should learn at home? Their answers to the surveys conducted under the European Values Study (EVS) over the last decades reveal both important agreements and persistent differences in notions of what a good upbringing means. 

Respondents have been asked to select, from a list, up to five qualities they consider especially important for children to learn at home. Some priorities seem to be widely shared. Here's one example: 

Across countries, “good manners" consistently emerges among the most frequently selected qualities. The same happens with "responsibility" and "tolerance and respect for others".  In other words, this is the common European core of child-rearing values: children should learn to behave well towards others, take responsibility, and treat other people with respect.  

Beyond that common core, however, countries differ enormously. Perhaps the most striking example concerns the value of “hard work.” In the latest EVS wave, only about 8% of Swedes and 10% of Finns and Danes selected hard work as an especially important quality to teach children. The corresponding figures were about 81% in Poland, 85% in Ukraine and 91% in Bulgaria.

What is particularly striking is how persistent this divide has been. Countries that placed relatively little emphasis on hard work several decades ago generally continue to do so, and the same continues to be true in countries where it occupied a central place in ideals of upbringing. 

Yet persistence is only part of the story. Other child-rearing values have changed slowly but decisively. For example, "obedience" — together with “religious faith” — has become less prominent since the 1990s: 

In contrast, other values have become more prominent. Here's an example:

“Independence,” as well as “imagination” and “determination/ perseverance,” have been increasingly selected as important qualities to impart at home. This overall pattern is compatible with a gradual weakening of ideals centred on deference and inherited authority, alongside greater emphasis on self-direction, creativity, and individual agency.

Finally, there are important differences within countries. Educational attainment is associated with a widespread divide in child-rearing values. In almost every single EVS survey, people with less than upper-secondary education are more likely than those with tertiary education to say that obedience is an important quality to teach children, with a median gap of about 16 points.

People with lower levels of formal education tend also to give greater priority to thrift, religious faith, good manners and, to a lesser extent, hard work. In contrast, college-educated respondents are generally more likely to select independence, imagination, determination and perseverance, responsibility, and tolerance and respect for other people. Looking at the age of survey respondents, we find a similar pattern. Older Europeans tend to place considerably more emphasis than younger people on thrift, religious faith, hard work and obedience. Younger respondents are much more likely to select independence, imagination, and determination or perseverance.

The overall picture is therefore one that combines a shared core, change, and persistent diversity. First, Europeans broadly agree that children should learn responsibility, good manners, and respect for others. Second, some older priorities, such as obedience and religious faith, have lost ground, and are today unfrequently mentioned by younger and more highly educated groups. Finally, enormous and remarkably durable differences between and within countries remain over other qualities, such as hard work.