While it's common for people to associate older age with more conservative values, new research indicates that parenthood may actually be responsible for pushing your economic and social beliefs to the right.
A team of international scientists, including those from Australia's Universities of Melbourne and New South Wales, have found that becoming a parent, rather than simply getting older, may influence people's beliefs and attitudes to become more right-leaning.
Through a series of surveys, the team demonstrated that 'parenting motives' - parenthood or parental care motivation (e.g. feelings towards a child crying) - fundamentally influence social conservatism across the world. In their research, social conservation was defined as a tendency to prefer safer, more traditional behaviours, social organisations and sources of moral guidance, alongside cultural ingroup preference and resistance to cultural change.
"In much the same way that feelings of sexual attraction motivate many mating behaviours, feelings of care, protection and tenderness towards children motivate parental care behaviours," the authors explained in their study, which is published in the biological research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
"Given the vital nature of parenthood and parental care motivation in human life, recent preliminary work suggests they may also shape fundamental aspects of social attitudes and cognition.
"Providing adequate parental care comes with immense costs in the form of time, money, energy and resources. Thus, a powerful motivational system facilitates engagement in such behaviours. Parental care motivation can be seen as an effective precursor to parental investment: by experiencing feelings of cuteness, fascination, concern and sympathy towards children - especially their own - adults are motivated to nurture and protect."
The findings also suggested that attitudes to subjects such as abortion, welfare and national security became more conservative as the number of children increased.
It's possible the tendency to have fewer children, or none at all with international increases in childlessness, could contribute to future liberalisation on social issues, the authors said.
Commenting on their research, the authors added: "Human reproduction requires unusually lengthy periods of care for children. The motivation to care for children is consequently among the fundamental drivers of human behaviour, but its power to shape social attitudes and cognition is underappreciated.
"Because socially conservative values ostensibly prioritise safety, stability, and family values, we predicted that being a parent and being more invested in parental care might make socially conservative policies more appealing.
"Here, we find evidence linking both parenthood and parental care motivation to increased social conservatism, that inducing parental care motives leads to increases in socially conservative attitudes, and that parenthood is associated with social conservatism around the world.
"In light of rapidly changing global birth rates, the current findings could have profound implications for the future political landscape."
The authors noted that having children, as opposed to simply growing older, may explain much of a global pattern of social conservatism increasing with age.
