Research Shows Significant Parental Influence over America's Teens in "Soul Searching"

Encouraging food for thought from Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005)...

"Many of the attitudes and statements of teenagers communicate to their parents do not exactly express great admiration and gratitude for and readiness to listen to, emulate, or freely obey their parents.  Many parents therefore appear to come to the conclusion that they have lost their influence in shaping the lives of their teenage children, that they no longer make any significant difference.  But for most, this conclusion is a mistake.

Teenagers' attitudes, verbal utterances, and immediate behaviors are often not the best evidence with which to estimate parental influence in their lives.  For better or worse, most parents in fact still do profoundly influence their adolescents - often more than do their peers - their children's apparent resistance and lack of appreciation notwithstanding.  This influence often also includes parental influence in adolescents' religious and spiritual lives.  Simply by living and interacting with their children, most parents establish expectations, define normally, model life practices, set boundaries, and make demands - all of which cannot help but influence teenagers, for good or ill. 

Most teenagers and their parents may not realize it, but a lot of research in the sociology of religions suggests that he most important social influence in shaping young people's religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents."