People more likely to embrace conservative values after having kids, study finds.

A new study has concluded that people who become parents or embrace the idea of having kids are more likely to support conservative ideologies.

The study of over 2,600 people in 10 different countries found that individuals who are already parents tend to embrace conservative views on abortion, sex, and immigration.

The analysis was further reinforced with archival data from 400,000 individuals in 88 countries that show conservative leanings are strengthened as people have more children.

Participants whose feedback included positive interactions with children or optimism toward the idea of parenting were more likely to lean toward conservative opinions on social issues.

The Tulane University research challenges a common American political narrative: people become more conservative as they get older. When the effects of parenthood were controlled in the study, older people without children were no more conservative than younger ones. The decision to become a parent in itself was the more decisive factor.

“Becoming a parent may have psychological effects that you don’t expect.”

“Becoming a parent may have psychological effects that you don’t expect,” says senior study author Damian Murray, associate professor of psychology at Tulane’s School of Science and Engineering, in a statement.

“We commonly talk about how parents are going to shape their children’s attitudes, but we also need to acknowledge how simply having children shapes their parents’ attitudes.”

Nick Kerry, PhD, a Tulane alumnus and co-author of the study says, “Because socially conservative values ostensibly prioritize safety, stability, and family values, we hypothesized that being a parent or being more invested in parental care might make socially conservative policies more appealing. Parental status and parental care motivation were robustly associated with social conservatism in many diverse countries, from Lebanon to Japan.”

The link between parenting and Conservative values is evident worldwide, not just in the United States, according to the study.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that being a “helicopter” parent could mean your child tipped conservative. While a “free-range explorer” style of parenting led to kids adopting a more liberal lifestyle later in life.

The latest research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that adults who choose to parent may already lean right politically.

“This is, of course, a large claim, and large claims require large amounts of evidence,” he said. “We’ve now tested this possibility across multiple investigations and have tried to prove the idea wrong in innumerable ways. We’ve controlled for any variables we, or others, could think of that might account for the parenthood-social conservatism link. But the relationship remains. We’re currently doing further research to better understand all the diverse ways in which our parenting motivations manifest.”