Class Over Cohort: Parenting Attitudes in Taiwan

Social class and cohort are widely recognized as two key factors that shape parenting attitudes. Yet studies rarely examine them together or assess their relative importance. This study investigates how these two factors jointly influence parenting attitudes. Using data from the 2021 Taiwan Social Change Survey (Family Module), the study examines four measures of parenting attitudes related to parent–child interactions: joint decision-making, preference fulfillment, rule enforcement, and nonintervention. The results show that class is positively associated with joint decision-making and negatively associated with nonintervention, whereas cohort is not significantly associated with any of the four measures. Furthermore, class-based differences are consistently negligible across cohorts. By highlighting the central role of social class, this study shows that parenting attitudes constitute an important domain through which social inequality is reproduced.