Correspondence in Parents' and Children's Concepts of God: Investigating the Role of Parental Values, Religious Practices and Executive Functioning

This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent-context factors and children's executive functioning relate to parent-child conceptual similarity. Parent-child dyads from varied religious and racial backgrounds participated. Dyads had the greatest conceptual similarity concerning God's mind-dependent functions. Though correspondence between parents and children was lowest concerning God's body-dependent functions, dyads were more similar about those functions when parents engaged in more frequent religious practices with their child and thought God was important. Children's concepts of God were unrelated to religious practices, and parent-child conceptual similarity was unrelated to children's age and executive functioning. Simply put, variation among parents' anthropomorphic concepts of God drove variation in parent-child conceptual similarity. Overall, these findings suggest that embodied concepts of God may be most sensitive to cultural input and that socialization practices provide greater insight into parents' anthropomorphic concepts.