Regular Religious Services Or A $10,000 Boost To Annual Income: Either Keeps The Kids Behaved

If you and your partner share the same religious beliefs and actively attend service, your child is less likely to engage in bullying, fighting, or arguing. While two parents of two different religious can actually increase a child’s acting out, being harmoniously on the same spiritual page with your significant other can have the same impacts on behavior as an additional $10,000 in annual income.

Livescience reports:

The results showed that having two parents who frequently attend religious services improves a child’s acting-out behaviors (such as fighting, arguing and bullying) by the same extent as a $10,000 increase in annual income. Single moms who were strict about their religious beliefs also had better-behaved children, perhaps because their parenting style provided extra structure for their children…

The study’s author Richard Petts, a sociologist at Ball State University in Indiana, observed that religion often times give parents another medium through which to express accountability to their kids:

“It’s sort of an additional type of social control, so kids aren’t just accountable to their parents, they’re accountable to this larger congregation,” Petts told LiveScience.

The study, however, is complicated by adherence to one particular type of family: the married kind. What science has been able to determine about the impacts of religion on children often does not extend to cohabiting partners or other family units. Different types of families tend to be shunned my many religious institutions, so the link between the two needs considerable more study.