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Notes -
Hot take: the characteristics of the optimal parenting style mirror the traditional relationship of God to humanity. A person who spends hours a week focusing on God’s relationship to himself is, practically speaking, understanding the optimal parenting strategy where he is on the receiving end. (Prayer can sometimes just be seeking for what the divine optimal parent would say). This translates into a general skill in being a parent. The reason there is a relationship between “very conservative” and mental health of children is that the very conservative have conserved their traditional understanding of deity as compassionate yet strict, punishing yet merciful, loving yet disciplining.
Cold take: kids with strict parents lie to interviewers on the phone about their parents.
It's worse than that, these calling houses typically aren't allowed to/won't talk to minors directly without a parent's involvement, the parent is ussually the one filling out the survey (and supposedly asking the child for their answers, but...).
Given that the this entire study is about disciplined and punitive parenting vs open and free-wheeling and the question is 'does your child say that you are great and they are doing great and everything is great when you ask them what to put down on this survey', there's probably a good measure of auto-correlation going on here.
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