A recent international study has shown some surprising and apparently contradictory results on the question of the priorities parents around the world have when raising their children. While the survey showed that some virtues are universally prized, interesting regional and national trends emerge when parents are asked to rate the importance of various qualities they wish to instil in their children.
Parents around the world seem to agree that good manners, a sense of responsibility and respect for others are important qualities to teach their children. But while West Europeans give all three qualities more or less equal importance, East Europeans and North Americans rate a sense of responsibility as by far the most important, and relegate respect for others to fourth place.
Interestingly, a sense of imagination ranked the lowest priority worldwide, although West Europeans gave the quality of flexible thinking twice the importance any other group did. The Italians stress the virtue of cultivating their youngsters' imagination more than most others surveyed, with the exception of Switzerland. The supposedly staid Swiss prize imaginative youth.
Etiquette-minded Belgians, Spaniards and Greeks placed the highest premium on politeness, while the Danes and Swedes put good manners lowest on the list. The newly-capitalist Eastern bloc countries also rated good manners as relatively unimportant, perhaps because they are being confronted with commercial competi- 23 tion for the first time. Together with the Swiss and the Turks, on the other hand, they prized the ability to communicate with others.
The virtues of tolerance and respect for others were most highly regarded in Scandinavia, France, Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain. This was not the case in Greece and the former Eastern bloc nations, which rated these as being of lesser importance.
Germans, Austrians and Swedes esteem personal independence, but the industrious French hold the quality of conscientiousness at work more dear than any other European nationals. The responses . in the industrialized nations of Sweden and Britain showed, perhaps bewilderingly, that nationals of those countries gave little importance to conscientiousness at work.
Polite Belgians answered that for them, obedience is among their paramount values; this sentiment is shared to a lesser degree by the British, Greeks and Irish. The Italians, according to their questionnaires, ranked this very low.
When rearing their children, the Greeks, Turks and Irish are alone in their emphasis on instilling strong religious beliefs.
One of the primary difficulties the researchers faced was translating the questions as perfectly as possible in order not to distort the result. "Imagination", for example, can be translated into Dutch as "conceited-ness"; perhaps this explains why the Dutch appeared to give imagination a low priority.
Also, some qualities are so ingrained in certain cultures that they are taken for granted, while others are given great emphasis because they are felt to be lacking in a particular society.