Judith Harris’s The Nurture Assumption infamously argues that parenting has little influence on how kids turn out. Parents’ real influence is largely genetic; kids are socialized by their friends.
The key exception comes when the parents play a larger role in the kids’ peer group. David Friedman runs with this idea in Parenting, Peer Groups and Keeping Kosher:
My friend and ex-colleague Larry Iannacone long ago raised the question of how, in a society like the U.S. with open entry to the religion industry, a religion can survive that imposes costly requirements on its adherents, requirements that do not produce any matching benefit. Why isn’t such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions — Judaism without koshruth rules, LDS with beer and coffee? His answer was that such restrictions do produce a “benefit” — they make it more difficult for adherents to interact outside of the religious community, and thus give them an incentive to spend time and effort producing community public goods, doing things that make being part of that community attractive.
It occurs to me that what I am seeing in Leo Rosten’s affectionate description of the world he grew up in may be a special version of that relevant to the first half of this post. If you are brought up in an environment which is sufficiently special to make your age peers at school feel like “them” rather than “us” and your parents and siblings and relatives like “us” rather than “them,” that may result in your identifying with the latter group. If their norms are better than those of the surrounding society, at least by their standards, they will see that as a good thing. Keeping their children is a benefit that may more than balance the costs of rules and rituals.
Friedman was raised in the “religion” of 18th-century rationalism, by the way:
Which, of course, might be just as effective a way of making most of the outside world, including my age peers as I was growing up, feel like “them.”
Indeed.