Changes in Authoritarian Family Ideology with Childrearing Experience

Abstract

In previous cross-sectional research postpartum white women who have just delivered a first child (primiparous women) have scored higher on a scale entitled Authoritarian Family Ideology than women whose delivery was of later children. This delivery order, or parity, effect was attributed to the difference in childrearing experience of the different parity levels. A rival hypothesis is that authoritarianism might be related to desired family size. Since women desiring small families are less likely to be sampled in a later delivery (multiparous) sample, the parity effect may be due to sampling from populations which differ in more than childrearing experience. If the effect is due to childrearing, scores of women primiparous at first contact should change over several years of parenthood until they reach the level of women who were multiparous at first contact. A sample of 309 white and 130 black women first tested after the delivery of a child were retested 3 yr. later. Consistent with previous report, the parity effect was found for white women but not for black women; retest scores for both parities and races were lower than first test scores, but this decrease was greater for those white women who had been primiparous at first contact. Thus the initial difference associated with parity dissipated with childrearing experience.