Incontro The diffusion of authoritarian parenting in Africa

Abstract

Parenting styles, which capture broad patterns of parental demandingness and responsiveness, influence children’s skills, preferences, and long-run economic outcomes. Yet little is known about their historical origins. We study whether Christian missions contributed to the diffusion of authoritarian parenting in Africa, a style characterized by strict control, obedience, and punitive discipline. We combine data on early twentieth-century mission locations with geo-referenced child-discipline data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, covering 220,660 children in 21 African countries. We measure authoritarian parenting using physical and emotional punishment and exploit variation in distance to historical missions, controlling for a rich set of geographic and historical characteristics. We rule out selective sorting by showing that mission locations are uncorrelated with

precolonial parenting practices measured using ethnographic and folkloristic data. We further strengthen identification with a simulated-missions approach that constructs counterfactual mission sites based on historically suitable but unselected locations. We find that proximity to historical missions increases authoritarian parenting today, raising the use of physical, and emotional punishment. At the same time, mission exposure increases parental investments in children’s health and human capital. The evidence points to missionary schooling as the main channel: effects are stronger near missions that operated

schools, and weaker where the colonial state exerted greater control over education. Consistent with this mechanism, data from the Violence Against Children Surveys show that regions with greater historical mission density exhibit more physical violence by community adults, concentrated among teachers. We also find weaker effects in areas where authoritarian parenting was already more prevalent before colonization, suggesting that missions were most transformative where local norms were initially less aligned with the disciplinary model they promoted. Taken together, the results show that Christian missions left a lasting imprint on parenting practices in Africa by promoting authoritarian childrearing norms.

with Alberto Ciancio, Giulia La Mattina and Luca Maria Pesando