The relationship between religiosity of parents and children in catholics – the role of parents in adolescents religious practice

This article is based on the “Religion and Human Rights 2,0” research, a survey carried out in Croatia (N = 1286) conducted on high school, Gymnasium, students 17-19 years old. It examines the influence of parents’ religiosity on the religious practice of adolescents among Catholics (N = 1097). There are three dominant questions to be addressed in the article: a) how much and how does the religiosity of their parents influence the religious practice of young people? b) how much does the religiosity of parents affect the specific dimensions of religious practice (the frequency of prayer, the frequency of going to church) of young people? c) does the impact of the parent’s religiosity on the child differ in cases where they are both the same sex and in cases in which they are not? The results, obtained by a series of linear regression analyses show that in a) and b) there is some influence of the religiosity of parents on young people. It is also shown that c) there is a dominant influence of the same-sex parent on the child in this respect (mother-daughter, father-son), while the incentive or compulsion to go to mass shows the effect only in the father-daughter dyad. The findings confirm the importance of parental religiosity for youth religiosity a little bit more for church attendance than for the frequency of prayer. They call for the use of elements of parental religiosity in the research of youth religiosity. They also point to the greater effect of parents’ religious beliefs and the importance they attach to their child’s religiosity than the coercion/incentive to religious practices.