Pathways of Parental Influence on the Development of Ageing Attitudes in Young Children

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Michaela Riediger
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550080053

The prevailing image of older adults in our culture is deficit-oriented. Such negative views, although widespread, are highly problematic: They are inaccurate as they do not recognize the large variability among older adults, with many defying the negative image of old age. In addition, they foster ageism, that is prejudice and discrimination of other people based on their age. Furthermore, they are harmful for individuals’ own future aging as they eventually turn against themselves. Prospective studies have shown that negative attitudes towards older adults predict less favorable aging processes decades later, such as worse physical or cognitive functioning. The common negative attitudes towards older adults thus have severe consequences for older persons, for younger individuals’ future aging, and for social welfare costs. Understanding how these negative attitudes develop and finding ways to combat them is thus important. As negative attitudes towards older adults are internalized already in childhood, our overarching objective is to investigate the processes that underlie the development of attitudes towards older adults in young children (aged 4-6 years). We focus on the role of parents who we assume to influence their children’s acquisition of age attitudes in various ways. We aim to elucidate pathways of parental influence, and thus provide the basis for future developments of interventions aimed at enabling parents to support their children in developing balanced and realistic attitudes towards older adults. We hypothesize that parents transmit their own aging attitudes to their children via their behavior towards, and in front of, their child, and via parental gatekeeping, that is, the extent to which parents permit children’s exposure to information that transmit ageist attitudes and the extent to which they modify such information through qualifying explanations vis-à-vis their children. We furthermore assume that parents’ awareness of the inaccuracy and detrimental intra- and interpersonal consequences of negative age stereotypes is associated with parents’ more balanced attitudes and less transmission of negative attitudes to their children via the assumed pathways. To test these hypotheses, we will measure behavioral, cognitive, affective, implicit and explicit attitudes toward aging in N = 150 parent-child dyads, and combine established and newly developed (interactional) paradigms to assess parental behavior, gatekeeping and awareness. Our findings will contribute to a better understanding of the development of aging attitudes in childhood and of potential levers to influence them. They will thus provide the basis for subsequent development of parental interventions aimed at providing more positive aging experiences for current and future generations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Luxembourg
• Partner Organisation: Fonds National de la Recherche
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Anna Kornadt, Ph.D.