argumentative essay about should parents decide who their child marries

if it should be parents who choose the partner of their children

monokakau 2 / 4   Nov 14, 2013   #1 Arranged marriage has been a controversial issue up to now.Some people hold beliefs that parents should choose the spouse for their children while others vehemently disapprove.From my point of wiew there being strongly resonable rationales why it should not be the parents but the bride/groom having right to choose their life-mate. To begin with, an arranged married with not much knowing about other's character easily leads to incompatibilities in marital life.Because the bride/groom holds out much expectations for each other,they properly disappoint when encoutering weaknesses during daily life.There may be other cases of the life-mates without a lot of meetings before wedding, hardly have they realized how different they are.As a result in marriage life they are not able to find a mutual understanding.Futher more,from time to time the couple especially the women although do not have a bissful marriage but having to suffer for the family's respect ,pride and social prejudge. Secondly,if people have to make the decision of their soulmate on their own they will have to try their best to make the marrige work.Having no one to blame in event of breakup because they have the chances and choices so that they have to intolerate of mistakes, weaknesses, try to share compassion feelings, listen undividedly to each other.This will virtually buid up a really firm marrige and the true reponsibility of the couple. Finally, under the pressure of many factors, an arranged marriage is likely to transform into a marriage of convenience.This means the wedding is mainly built on fiancial,political or religious reasons.How difficult for a profound love to blossom in such cases.So without the passionate feeling of love, can a marriage be truly happy ? On the other hand, others may claim that an arranged marrige free some couples from suffering strong protests of family members.In addition hardly have they worry about bad manner or financial problems because their parents usually take into account carefully.However,can a convenient marriage life make compensation for the true feeling in love?Futher more, some strongly approve of this marital life because it just have 0 to 7 % of divorce compared with 55 % of love marriage.However; do these statistics express the complete happy marriage?The couple having an arranged marriage are usually reluctant to break up because of pressure from family in spite of their annoying disappointment while who have a love marriage are more open-minded about the reason to marry and the necessity of divorce when the love is gone. In conclusion, whereby these persuasive reasons, marrige should never depend predomantly on the parents' choice.To finding their right missing piece, people have to make their own decision and take invaluable advice from their experienced parents.

OP monokakau 2 / 4   Nov 15, 2013   #3 i am very glad for receiving the reply but can i ask why not life mate i have read this in some stories. finally i do not know the words to express my delight to receive yours as the first reply of mine.

asifulizlam 3 / 7   Nov 15, 2013   #4 To begin with, an arranged married an arrange marriage

‘Child Marriages’ — Coercion or Choice?

Two out of five girls in Sub-Saharan Africa marry under the age of 18. A global movement to end “child marriage” often assumes that they are coerced into marrying by their families at a cost to their schooling, mental health and physical wellbeing.

“That’s a dominant narrative within the international development sector, that ‘child marriage’ happens because daughters are forced to marry at young ages for their parents’ financial benefit and that marrying early is fundamentally harmful to the girl’s wellbeing,” said Susan Schaffnit , a postdoctoral scholar in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Anthropology . “But surprisingly little research has explored local peoples’ perceptions of early marriage or directly tested whether parents gain and daughters suffer from marrying under 18 years.”

In a pair of papers, lead author Schaffnit and David Lawson , a UCSB assistant professor of anthropology, report on a study of the timing of marriage, bridewealth payments (transferred from the groom’s family to the bride’s family) and women’s wellbeing in rural Tanzania. The papers are published this month in Nature Human Behaviour and in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters.

“We find that marrying early brings a higher bridewealth, which may incentivize early marriage of daughters for parents to some extent,” Schaffnit said. “But marrying at ages 15 to 17 is not obviously detrimental to daughters, with the wellbeing of those marrying early largely indistinguishable from those that marry above 18 years. In fact, marrying early was associated with greater empowerment in household decisions and marriage at any age was viewed as increasing a woman’s social status.”

The authors also report that most girls and women themselves decided when and who to marry. “The terms ‘child marriage’ and ‘forced marriage,’ ” Schaffnit said, “are often used interchangeably by development organizations, but we demonstrate that there are contexts in which young people decide to marry early and may be incentivized to do so by gains in status and respect at home and in the community.”

Lawson stressed that parental coercion in early marriage does occur in some circumstances. “We’re not claiming that girls are never forced into early marriages,” he said. “This certainly happens in some contexts, including in Tanzania. But in contexts where ‘child marriage’ mainly takes place in late adolescence, and where autonomy in partner choice is clearly apparent, we need to be careful not to falsely vilify parents. For some young women, it may represent a strategic choice to marry early and be the best locally available option, especially if they are already sexually active or they have started having children.”

Schaffnit also notes the importance of considering locally-available options. “Marrying early was associated with lower educational attainment,” she said, “but rather than early marriage causing girls to drop out of school, the most likely explanation here is that girls that leave school for other reasons have few socially acceptable options in life but to marry and start a family.”

The papers were based on surveys of nearly 1,000 girls and women 15 to 35 years in rural Mwanza Region, where 35 percent of brides marry before age 18. Only 2 percent married before age 15.

The papers are “Parent-offspring conflict unlikely to explain ‘child marriage’ in northwestern Tanzania,” in Nature Human Behaviour, and “ ‘Child marriage’ in context: Exploring local attitudes towards early marriage in rural Tanzania,” in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters. Other co-authors are Anushé Hassan of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Mark Urassa of the National Institute of Medical Research in Mwanza, Tanzania.

 “Future research should distinguish between early marriage in late adolescence and very early marriage, which is considerably rarer in Tanzania,” Lawson said. “Boundaries between childhood and adulthood are flexible, and fixating on an arbitrary 18-year-old threshold means we may miss opportunities to support girls and women regardless of their precise age at marriage.”

In 2016 Tanzania revised the legal age of marriage for girls from 15 years to 18 years, but this has since been appealed due to conflict with local customs.

Lawson was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant that will fund further research on early marriage in Tanzania for two years. The NSF Cultural Anthropology Program Senior Research Award totals roughly $200,000.

“It is critical that our understanding of early marriage is grounded in reality, not stereotypes or surface impressions,” Lawson said. “Support from the NSF will allow us to further explore why early marriage is sometimes considered the best locally available option by adolescents themselves, and ultimately better inform global initiatives to support vulnerable girls and young women in low-income settings like rural Tanzania.”

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Should Marriages Be Arranged by Parents?

Favorite Quote: trust your heart if the seas catch fire (and live by love though the stars walk backward)

The problem that arises between parents and children of becoming age is whether or not his or her marriage should be arranged. This problem arises more in the Eastern civilization as compared to the Western due to traditions, customs and religion. It is obvious that many parents agree that it should be arranged while the children think otherwise. This problem occurs in almost every household eventually. If it is arranged by the parents of the child then it most likely would be a success and a failure. It would be a success because the parents are more thorough in their search of a spouse for their, hopefully, soon to be wed child. So the chances of them choosing a person of a bad background, and unfaithful personality are very slim. So in that perspective, the marriage would be successful. However, the chances of their child to lead a happy life are also slim, as they may grow to hate their spouses and refuse to have children with him or her. So in this case the marriage would be a failure. If it is a love marriage and not arranged by the parents, then it would most likely be a success and a failure. It would be a failure as our generation is much more reckless, spontaneous and much more unwise which could lead to a disaster. The child may choose an irresponsible, unfaithful, or/and inappropriate spouse. They may not care about his or her past, but that could lead to the collapse of not only their marriage, but their lives. However, the marriage could be proved successful. If it was a love marriage, then obviously, they would marry someone they love or deeply care about. So no matter how short and unsuccessful their marriage may be there would be some moments in which the child would be extremely happy, and isn’t that happiness worth all the trouble? In my opinion, I think that no matter what we do, the marriage would be a success and a fail despite many cases. I do agree that many marriages arranged and love have been proved quite successful, but do you, whether you’re the parent or child, want to take such a high risk? Would you be ready for the consequences that can come in either marriage? I think that everyone should marry the one we love, however I do not agree with having the risk of a short, abrupt and unhappy marriage. So, I think that the child and the parents should have a say in the marriage, because this event in one’s life could affect it drastically. No matter if the marriage is arranged or not, there would be many ups and downs we must face, but the parents and children should face them together.

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Favorite Quote: "Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it." "Violence is never the answer! It is a question, and the answer is yes."

1. Don't list. Every paragraph is started with another version of: "it was a sucess and a failure" or "Marriage should be arranged or not arranged". 

2. Find an arguement that will blow your reader's mind and be backed up by statistical evidence or quotation.

3. No "I think"s, it weakens your arguement one hundredfold.

4. Read Sin Boldly! by David R. Williams, Ph. D.

That is all I, a thirteen year-old kid, has to say about inproving your writing.

Favorite Quote: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thought never to heaven go.

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30+ Great Argumentative Essay Topics About Family with Essay prompts

To help you get started with argumentative essay writing, we’ve compiled a list of some potential argumentative Essay Topics About Family. Whether you’re looking for something lighthearted or something a little more serious, we’re sure you’ll find something on this list on Topics About Family with essay prompts

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Essay prompt:  Today’s generation seems to have a more complex perspective of the world, but much clearer than before. Having these in mind, people do seem to slowly accept and readapt to these great changes that improve their perception of society today.

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• Addiction as a product of Social Dislocation and Family Stress.

Essay prompt:  Societal addiction to drug and substance use has, and still is, a menace to our human society, prompting extreme measures to be put in place to not only curb, but also try to eradicate the problem.

Here are additional 60+ Top And Best Argumentative Essay Topics For Different Contexts

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Field Notes

Modern Lessons From Arranged Marriages

By Ji Hyun Lee

• Jan. 18, 2013

WHETHER arranged marriages produce loving, respectful relationships is a question almost as old as the institution of marriage itself. In an era when 40 to 50 percent of all American marriages end in divorce, some marriage experts are asking whether arranged marriages produce better relationships in the long run than do typical American marriages, in which people find each other on their own and romance is the foundation.

Experts also ask whether there are lessons in how arranged marriages evolve that can be applied to nonarranged marriages in the United States. Among them is Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavior Research and Technology in Vista, Calif., and author of a new study, “How Love Emerges in Arranged Marriages.”

He found that one key to a strong arranged marriage is the amount of parental involvement at its start. The most important thing parents of the couple do, he said, is to “screen for deal breakers.”

“They’re trying to figure out whether something could go wrong that could drive people apart,” Dr. Epstein said.

Some couples who have entered into satisfying arranged marriages do attribute the success of their unions to the involvement of their parents. A. J. Khubani was 25 in 1985 when his parents tried to get him to visit Inder Sen Israni and Maya Israni in Jaipur, India, friends of the Khubani family, and meet the couple’s daughter Poonam.

“I just refused,” said Mr. Khubani, who was not keen on settling down because he had just started Telebrands, a company in Fairfield, N.J., that sells inventions via infomercials on late-night television. “I didn’t see why it was so important that I had to fly across the world to see one girl,” Mr. Khubani, now 52, remembered.

Ms. Israni, now Mrs. Khubani, was not ready, either. At the time she was a soap opera star and rising Bollywood actress.

Getting them to meet took some prodding: Mr. Khubani’s father, knowing that his son was going to Asia on business, offered to pay his way if he stopped in Jaipur. The young man and woman both relented, with the casual assumption that they would just please their parents “and that would be the end of it,” Mrs. Khubani said.

When they finally met, neither was impressed. Mrs. Khubani recalled, “It wasn’t love at first sight at all.” Love did not kick in until Mr. Khubani became sick and the young woman he had just met stayed by his bedside to care for him. “Nobody understood his accent because he was so American,” she said, and so she was his translator. For Mr. Khubani, her caring and elegant manners sealed the deal.

“Spending a couple of days in the room with her, alone, I fell in love with her,” he said.

They have been married for 27 years.

Arranged marriages can work “because they remove so much of the anxiety about ‘is this the right person?’ ” said Brian J. Willoughby, an assistant professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. “Arranged marriages start cold and heat up and boil over time as the couple grows. Nonarranged marriages are expected to start out boiling hot but many eventually find that this heat dissipates and we’re left with a relationship that’s cold.”

He also credited supportive parents.

“Whether it be financial support for weddings, schooling or housing, or emotional support for either partner, parents provide valuable resources for couples as they navigate the marital transition,” Dr. Willoughby said.

But does it really take a village to build a strong marriage?

“I don’t think love marriage and arranged marriage are as different as we make them out to be,” said Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor in the department of sociology at Stanford University. “The people we end up married to or partnered up with end up being similar to us in race, religion and class background and age, which means that they might not be all that different from the person that your mother would have picked for you.”

Divorce rates have climbed in countries like South Korea , Iran , China , and even in India, where parents traditionally have had a strong hand in the marriages of their children. And while India may boast of having one of the lowest divorce rates in the world — below 3 percent by some estimates — divorce there still carries a great stigma. It is also a country in which divorce sometimes is not an option for many women and those seeking dissolution have encountered violence .

In the United States, both parents and young adults still value marriage, Dr. Willoughby said. Their differences, he wrote in an e-mail, “are in sequencing and timing. It’s more about parents and children disagreeing about how they get to marriage and when it happens.”

With “free-range” marriages predominant, this approach discourages parental intervention.

“We celebrate autonomy,” noted Dr. Epstein, which, he explained, is why adult children bristle at the idea. But given the speed at which couples meet, greet, cohabitate and separate these days, he said, he thought there was some logic in trying a method that has worked for so many couples and in so many cultures.

Orthodox Jews in the United States are known for arranging marriages, with some parents using professional matchmakers.

“In the secular world, a lot of the times a couple will fall in love with each other and then at that point they lose objectivity,” said Rabbi Steven Weil, the executive vice president at the Orthodox Union in New York. In arranged marriages, however, “there is a lot of homework, a lot of energy spent, before a young man and woman fall in love with each other. For that reason, the parents are involved. But obviously it’s the decision of the young man and woman, but a parent knows a child.”

For many Korean mothers, the prospect of marriage for their children is not a wait-for-it option. These parents also call in professional matchmakers to direct their career-minded children into becoming marriage-minded.

Diane Kim of Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking in New York reported that some 40 percent of her clients in the agency’s Asian-American division are mothers calling on behalf of their sons. Many have a “demand” list of expectations. Among them: the woman must be beautiful, have an Ivy League education, come from a good family whose members are also educated, and have professional goals similar to their son.

“And then they say, ‘Can you find somebody that fits that mold?’ ” said Ms. Kim, whose matchmaking fees start at $5,000 and include 12 introductions. “My job is not just about setting people up; it’s about educating the parents.”

Bringing about these mother-tested, child-approved marriages is not easy. “I have instances where parents pay without the knowledge of their children,” Ms. Kim said, “and I would have to contact the children and tell them, ‘Hey, this might be a little awkward — and a big surprise — but your parents have signed you up. Don’t freak out.’ ”

It was through the efforts of Ms. Kim, while she was employed at another matchmaking service, Duo, that Neil Hwang, 34, a management consultant for a Manhattan investment firm, married his wife, Patty, last July.

“My mother was very proactive about getting me set up to meet women,” said Mr. Hwang, who also noted that both his parents were members of a social club that those in Mr. Hwang’s age group had nicknamed Korean Parents United for Unmarried Children.

Mrs. Hwang, a social studies teacher at a public high school in Bergen County, N.J., had also reached the crisis age of 31 and was under pressure from her parents. She was gently coerced into trying out a matchmaking service at the recommendation of her father, who had already paid for it. When the couple married last summer, Mrs. Hwang recalled her parents saying with some degree of triumph, “We knew it was going to happen!”

When his first marriage ended in divorce, Deepak Sarma, 43, a professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned a valuable lesson in doing things in accordance with family approval. When it came time to make a second go at marriage, he approached his parents, asking, “Who’s out there for me?” But as an Indian-American divorcée who was not a doctor, lawyer or engineer, it was clear to his parents that his “low desirability” would make any marital arrangement difficult.

Once, while Professor Sarma was in India, his parents arranged for him to meet with a few prospective fathers-in-law. Although his offer implicitly included “a passageway to America,” he said they immediately discarded his candidacy as a groom.

“I wasn’t good enough,” he said.

Instead, he met a woman at a networking event in Cleveland in 2004. She was an internist at a clinic nearby and happened to see Mr. Sarma, a Hindu, on a panel speaking about Jainism, a religion practiced by her family, who had long insisted on her marrying within the faith. Hearing Mr. Sarma talk about a world that had closed her off to so many people, that woman, now his wife, Dr. Rita Sarma, felt a connection.

“I could hardly stay in tune with the lecture itself because I was thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’ ” Dr. Sarma said. “He was looking kind of dash. So I lingered around, and I kind of waited.”

The two bonded over their experiences in the culture of American Born Confused Desis, slang for Americanized Indians.

“It was serendipitous,” Mr. Sarma said. But he still had to persuade her father, and ultimately had to call on his own father to intercede on his behalf. It was only after all of the in-laws passed one another’s criteria that the green light was given.

Dr. Epstein admitted that the tradition of arranged marriages had no hope of gaining wide acceptance in this country.

“We celebrate rugged individualism that is antithetical to the arranged marriage culture,” he said. He argues instead for deeper parental involvement. “When you realize what it is that the families are doing, it makes excellent sense,” he said.

Which is not unlike the experience of the Sarmas, who found an American-style “love marriage” with a familial twist. Mr. Sarma now revels in the fact that he is living what has long been held up as an American marriage ideal.

“The great irony is, like, I came back here and I married a doctor, right?” he said.

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The Effect of Parents’ Attitudes on Sons’ Marriage Timing

Elyse a. jennings.

University of Michigan

William G. Axinn

Dirgha j. ghimire.

Theories of family stability and change, demographic processes, and social psychological influences on behavior all posit that parental attitudes and beliefs are a key influence on their children’s behavior. Though we have evidence of these effects in Western populations, there is little information regarding this social mechanism in non-Western contexts. Furthermore, comparisons of mothers’ and fathers’ independent roles in these crucial intergenerational mechanisms are rare. This paper uses measures from a ten-year family panel study featuring independent interviews with both mothers and fathers in rural Nepal to investigate these issues. We test the association of specific attitudes, rather than broad ideational domains, about childbearing and old-age care with sons’ subsequent marriage behavior. Our results indicate that both mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes have important and independent influences on sons’ marriage behavior. Simultaneous study of both parents’ attitudes reveals that gender-specific parenting contexts can shape the relationship between parental attitudes and children’s behaviors. This crucial mechanism of intergenerational continuity and change is strong in this non-Western setting, with substantial implications for studies of intergenerational influences on behavior in all settings.

Introduction

Substantial empirical evidence demonstrates that parental attitudes and expectations shape their children’s subsequent behavior. This evidence is limited to rich, industrialized countries with individualistic orientations toward social life and a high degree of personal independence and freedom ( Liefbroer and de Jong Gierveld 1993 ; Sewell et al. 1975 ; Thompson, Alexander, and Entwisle 1988 ; Whitbeck, Simons, and Kao 1994 ). There is little systematic, general population investigation of this relationship among the majority of the world’s population, who live in poorer and more agrarian countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These populations tend to have more collectivist orientations and lower independence than in the US ( Jayakody, Thornton, and Axinn 2008 ; Sastry and Ross 1998 ; Thornton and Lin 1994 ). In these societies, some of which are characterized by strong beliefs about the importance of both living parents and deceased ancestors, families play a central role in people’s lives ( Goode 1970 ; Lee, Parish, and Willis 1994 ; Ogburn and Tibbitts 1933 ; Thornton and Lin 1994 ; Westermarck [1891] 1894 ). Therefore parents’ attitudes and expectations should be especially powerful predictors of their children’s behavior.

Rural Asian populations provide strong examples of societies with more collectivist orientations than Western populations. Asian societies historically emphasize selfless subordination to family and extended kinship, especially to senior kin ( Goode 1970 ; Sastry and Ross 1998 ). Also, decisions about family formation have historically been considered too important to be left to the young themselves, making parents important decision-makers in their children’s family formation behaviors ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ; Macfarlane 1976 ; Watkins 1996 ). Furthermore, in the absence of economic prospects outside the home, parental inheritance remains the primary source of livelihood and wealth for young people, especially sons ( Cain 1977 ; Gertler and Lillard 1994 ). Hence, parents have a great deal of opportunity to influence their children in these settings. This paper investigates the consequences of parents’ attitudes and expectations for their sons’ marriage timing in such a setting: rural Nepal. We expect parental influences on children to be powerful in these settings relative to societies with more individualistic orientations. Of course both collectivist societies and individualistic societies are characterized by high heterogeneity within populations ( Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988 ), making direct comparison across societies complex and beyond the scope of this investigation.

We construct a new framework for the study of intergenerational consequences of parental attitudes and expectations. This framework is specially designed to extend established intergenerational and attitude-behavior frameworks to the study of radically different social and economic contexts. Theoretically, this framework advances the study of intergenerational influences in three ways. First, the framework addresses a crucial issue in the study of ideational influences on behavior – the differences between broad ideational domains and specific attitudes and expectations. Our empirical investigation then focuses on specific attitudes and expectations. Second, we use this framework to identify hypotheses that go beyond linking behavior to attitudes about that specific behavior. Rather, we identify specific attitudes and expectations about family behaviors other than marriage that we expect to shape children’s marriage behavior. Third, we illuminate context-specific mechanisms likely to create important differences in the consequences of mothers’ versus fathers’ attitudes and expectations.

The juxtaposition of mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes is an especially important advance in this area, as the influence of each parent may depend on the role they hold within the family. Because these mechanisms are context-specific, their identification in a radically different family context such as rural Nepal provides an essential contrast to potential parental gender differences in settings such as the US. To further clarify the independent influence of parents’ attitudes we also investigate young peoples’ own attitudes, which are well known to be shaped by – but independent of – their parents’ attitudes, as another key influence on marriage timing.

Empirically, this paper takes advantage of unique intergenerational panel data spanning more than a decade that documents family change and variation in rural Nepal. These data feature a representative sample of linked parent-son triads, measures of attitudes and expectations from key family domains, direct personal interviews with mothers, fathers, and sons, and ten years of monthly panel data on sons’ subsequent marital behavior. Independent measurement of the attitudes of mothers, fathers, and their sons in a panel study with subsequent measures of behavioral consequences is exceptionally rare; this unique empirical resource provides the means to dramatically advance our knowledge of intergenerational attitude-behavior linkages.

Theoretical Framework

In order to extend established intergenerational and attitude-behavior frameworks to radically different social and economic contexts, we first differentiate between broad ideational domains and specific ideas. Both are relevant to behavior, but we focus on specific ideas, acknowledging that these ideas are often linked to broad ideational domains. The framework also identifies key specific ideas that vary within a population and are likely to be closely associated with specific behaviors. We focus on marriage timing behavior among males in rural Nepal – specificity in both behavior and study population that allows for the identification of specific ideas likely to influence that behavior. Finally, the framework also identifies the role that both parents’ ideas may play in behavioral decision-making. Following the central theme of important long-term intergenerational effects on children, we focus on the role of parental attitudes, comparing and contrasting the potential consequences of mothers’ versus fathers’ attitudes.

Broad Ideational Domains versus Specific Attitudes and Expectations

Many social scientists argue that a key difference between South Asian settings such as Nepal and Western Europe or the United States lies in broad ideational domains. These might include individualism, collectivism, fatalism, freedom and equality, materialism, familism, or developmental idealism ( Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1987 ; Goode 1970 ; Hechter et al. 1999 ; Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988 ; Thornton 2005 ). Investigation of these broad ideational domains reveals that within a single population, some behavioral trends and some individual-level variations are associated with variations in these broad ideational domains ( Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1987 ; Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988 ). There is potential, then, that ideational contrasts at a societal level are reflected in individual-level ideational variations within populations, and those individual-level variations are connected to subsequent behavioral choices.

Social psychological scholarship on the mechanisms linking ideas to actions often focuses on specific ideas – specific attitudes or expectations – rather than broad ideational domains. The leading research in this area argues that attitudes toward a particular behavior, along with subjective norms, predict intentions, and intentions predict behavior ( Ajzen 1988 ; Fishbein and Ajzen 1975 ). Thus, positive attitudes toward marriage, coupled with social influence favoring marriage, increase the likelihood and speed of marriage ( Liefbroer and de Jong Gierveld 1993 ; Thornton, Axinn, and Xie. 2007 ). Following this perspective, the strongest ideational predictor of most behaviors is likely to be the attitude toward that specific behavior. For example, attitudes toward childbearing predict childbearing behavior ( Coombs 1974 ; Freedman, Freedman, and Thornton 1980 ; Thomson 1997 ), attitudes toward contraception predict contraceptive use ( Biddlecom, Casterline, and Perez 1997 ; Odimegwu 1999 ), attitudes toward marriage predict marital behavior ( Bayer 1969 ), attitudes toward premarital cohabitation predict cohabiting behavior ( Clarkberg, Stolzenberg, and Waite 1995 ), attitudes toward divorce predict divorce behavior ( Thornton 1985 ), and attitudes toward educational attainment predict educational attainment ( Astone and McLanahan 1991 ; Sewell et al. 1975 ).

The second contribution of our framework, in its extension of established attitude-behavior frameworks, is the identification of both closely related and opposing attitudes as equally important predictors of behavior. This theoretical extension of the reasoned action and planned behavior theory is crucial to our framework because it maintains a focus on specific attitudes but also broadens the range of specific attitudes that may be relevant. For example, Barber (2001) shows that attitudes toward educational attainment shape behaviors that influence pregnancy, and Barber and Axinn (1998) show that attitudes about childbearing shape the timing of marriage. We expect that people enter adulthood with numerous specific attitudes and expectations that may shape marriage behavior in addition to their attitudes about marriage itself ( Ajzen 1988 ; Fishbein and Ajzen 1975 ; Thornton et al. 2007 ).

Of course specific attitudes may well be a reflection of broader ideational domains. For example, those who are highly individualistic may hold more negative attitudes toward marriage while those who are highly familistic may hold more positive attitudes toward marriage. But specific attitudes may also be independent of broader ideational domains. We are fortunate to have measures from a study that was designed to measure both specific attitudes and broad ideational domains. This unique measurement resource gives us the means to focus our empirical investigation on specific attitudes rather than broad ideational domains.

A third extension of our framework, in addition to the identification of which specific attitudes are likely to be important, is the context-specific reasoning in identifying whose attitudes are likely to be influential. We limit our reasoning to the marriage timing of sons rather than the marriage timing of both sons and daughters because the marital experiences of sons and daughters differ greatly in Nepal, as in South Asia more generally. For example, though the majority of daughters (76%) experience arranged marriage in this setting, half of sons enjoy considerable input into the choice of both whom they marry and when they marry ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). As a result, the context of marriage is quite different for men and women, especially in which and whose specific attitudes are likely to be influential. In fact, because daughters’ marriages are arranged by parents in such high proportions, observed correlations with parental attitudes need not reflect intergenerational mechanisms. The remainder of our theoretical framework is designed to generate testable hypotheses regarding the consequences of specific attitudes for sons’ marriage behavior.

Which Attitudes?

The setting for this research is Chitwan Valley in south central Nepal, near the Indian border. The majority of people in this region identify as Hindu. They practice arranged marriage, where older generations of relatives seek spouses and negotiate marriages for younger generations. However, sons have been gaining autonomy in spouse choice ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). Marriage timing is also changing rapidly, with the mean age at marriage for males rising from 16.8 years for those married between 1950 and 1959 to 21.9 years for those married between 1990 and 1996 ( Yabiku 2005 ). Marriage and childbearing are closely linked and both are nearly universal. 1 Children are needed for both short term economic productivity and longer term old-age security, and marriage is an essential step toward childbearing ( Cain 1977 ; Caldwell 1982 ; Yabiku 2004 ). Sons are especially valued for this economic assistance and old-age care, and also for the performance of death rituals ( Bennett 1983 ; Fricke 1986 ). 2

In rural Asian settings like this one, specific attitudes about ideal family size and the responsibility of sons to care for elderly parents are particularly likely to influence decisions about marriage timing. The timing of the transition to marriage drives the production of children, and both the pace and total number of children have consequences for parents, grandparents, and the wider kin network ( Bennett 1983 ; Fricke 1986 ). In US settings, parental attitudes about family size and their children’s childbearing are powerful in shaping their desires for their children to marry quickly ( Barber and Axinn 1998 ). Attitudes about family size and children’s responsibility to care for parents when they reach old age are likely to be just as powerful in this kind of setting.

A desire for many children or the pressure to have many children is likely to lead to earlier marriage in most settings. In settings of high variation in marital behavior, such as the US, the desire for many children speeds marriage because couples prefer to be married for childrearing ( Liefbroer and de Jong Gierveld 1993 ; Manning 1995 ). In Nepal, a setting of relatively low variation in marital behavior and virtually no premarital births, childbearing attitudes emerge as even more important. Marriage is not only desirable for childrearing, but it is also a necessary status for childbearing.

Although essentially everyone marries in Nepal, those who desire many children may be among the fastest to marry while those who prefer few children will wait for later marriage ( Fricke 1986 ; Gipson and Hindin 2007 ; Hirschman and Rindfuss 1982 ). Because sex outside of marriage is rare in Nepal, and pregnancy outside of marriage is even rarer ( Retherford and Thapa 1998 ), those who wish to have many children are motivated to marry quickly in order to become sexually active ( Gipson and Hindin 2007 ). Literature in the US suggests that people will prefer to marry if they have a desire for childbearing, not only because marriage is the most socially acceptable union in which to do so, but also because marriage facilitates childrearing ( Barber and Axinn 1998 ; Manning 1995 ). Thus, both of these mechanisms work in the same direction in both generations, potentially making attitudes about family size an exceptionally strong influence on marriage timing in Nepal.

Analytic implications: Specific attitudes regarding family size preferences are likely an important influence on marriage timing in this setting.

Research on fertility transition in general, and fertility behavior in South Asia in particular, frequently identifies old-age security needs as a motivation to have children ( Cain 1991 ; Caldwell 1982 ; Lillard and Willis 1994 ; Willis 1980 ). In fact, the demand for kin care networks is so high in rural South Asia that we expect the need for old-age security to relate to marriage timing ( Bennett 1983 ; Fricke 1986 ; Niraula 1995 ). In a setting like Nepal, where the political economy is unstable, the government social security scheme is minimal, and private pensions and health insurance are rare, parental need for old-age care from the younger generation is exceptionally high ( Caldwell 1982 ; Lillard and Willis 1994 ; Niraula 1995 ; Willis 1980 ). 3 Children’s marriages are the first step toward construction of a kin care network for old age support. Therefore, variations in attitudes toward responsibility for care of elderly parents are also likely to be a strong influence on variations in marriage timing. In Nepal, sons have historically taken on the care of their own parents, while daughters often co-reside with and provide care for their husbands’ parents ( Bennett 1983 ; Goldstein, Schuler, and Ross 1983 ; Niraula 1995 ). Thus, this specific attitudinal domain is likely to be associated with sons’ marriage timing because sons’ marriage usually brings an additional caregiver into the home.

Analytic implications: Specific attitudes regarding sons’ responsibility for parental care in old age are likely an important influence on marriage timing in this setting.

Whose Attitudes?

Mothers, fathers, and sons will not always hold the same attitudes, and sons’ behaviors may not respond to each person’s attitude equally. In fact, parents’ attitudes may have more influence than sons’ own attitudes in domains in which parental attitudes are particularly important to children ( Axinn and Thornton 1993 ). Of course, children’s attitudes may also be independent of parents’ attitudes, especially in a setting such as Nepal, where the younger generation has exposure to a wider range of non-family experiences than the older generation ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). In the following section, we discuss the theoretical reasons for studying mothers and fathers separately, as well as the reasons that sons may make decisions independent of their parents’ desires.

Parents’ Attitudes

Previous evidence clearly demonstrates that parental attitudes, values, and beliefs about a range of issues can influence children’s behavior ( Barber 2001 ; Bengtson 1975 ; Glass, Bengston, and Dunham 1986 ; Longmore et al. 2009 ).This could happen through social control, where children behave in the way that their parents want them to behave in order to please them rather than behaving that way because it is how the children prefer to behave ( Gecas and Seff 1990 ; Goldstein et al. 1983 ; Liefbroer and de Jong Gierveld 1993 ; Smith 1988 ). Children may behave in ways that they believe will make their parents happy even when parents are not invoking social control techniques ( Barber 2000 ; Liefbroer and de Jong Gierveld 1993 ). On the other hand, this can happen through socialization, where children conform to their parents’ attitudes by internalizing those attitudes ( Manning, Longmore, and Giordano 2007 ; Starrels and Holm 2000 ).

In this setting there is strong value placed on obedience and respect for elders and parents, and parents often have complete control over the means of production and household decisions ( Goldestin et al. 1983 ; Niraula 1995 ). Thus, it is especially likely that parents influence their children through the mechanism of social control. There are many ways that parents may exert social control over their sons’ marriage ( Goldstein et al. 1983 ; Lee et al. 1994 ). For example, parents who value marriage may use their resources to steer their children toward marriage ( Thornton et al. 2007 ). This may entail refusal to invest in sons’ education, as educational enrollment is a deterrent to marrying quickly ( East 1998 ; Thornton, Axinn, and Teachman 1995 ; Yabiku 2004 ). In Nepal, parents also exert social control on marriage by finding potential spouses for their children. In an effort to encourage marriage, they may begin the process of arranging their sons’ marriage early. These mechanisms are examples of ways in which parents’ attitudes may influence their sons’ marriage behavior directly and independent of the sons’ own attitudes.

Socialization may also be a powerful parental influence on children ( Mead 1934 ; Peterson and Rollins 1987 ; Starrels and Holm 2000 ). Parents who prefer early marriage are likely to display this value in consistent ways, thereby teaching their children similar attitudes. They might express negative impressions of young adults who remain unmarried, or enthusiasm when celebrating the marriages of friends and family. Parents might also influence children’s attitudes in their choice of surroundings ( Bengston 1975 ). For example, parents who value work and education over marriage may choose to live in a place where they can better expose their children to the workplace and schools. Having greater exposure to these settings, in turn, may lead children to value things like work and education over marriage ( Mead 1934 ). In these ways, parents may socialize their children to hold the same attitudes and values. Though the relevance of parental preferences for children’s behaviors may decline across age, the considerable influence that parents have over their children’s behavior is likely to shape children’s opportunities and constraints in adulthood ( Caldwell 1982 ; Elder 1975 ; Glass et al. 1986 ). Of course socialization and social control are potentially closely interrelated, so both may simultaneously influence children.

Analytic implications: Sons’ behavior is likely to be directly related to their parents’ attitudes.

Mothers’ and Fathers’ Attitudes

There is ample evidence that parents’ attitudes influence their children’s behavior, but less is known about the different influences exerted by each parent. Although a great deal of intergenerational research has documented important effects of mothers on their children, much less has examined the effects of fathers ( Forum on Child and Family Statistics 1998 ; Thornton 2001 ). Even less research has directly compared the effects of mothers to the effects of fathers. The absence of research on fathers’ role was recognized as a major weakness of demographic research in the 1990s, and since that time research on fathers has become an especially high scientific priority ( Forum on Child and Family Statistics 1998 ; Nock 1998 ; Thornberry, Smith, and Howard 1997 ). Although these priorities center on family research in the US and other Western settings, we have even greater reason to investigate fathers’ roles in Asian settings like Nepal, where intergenerational property and social transmission is paternal in nature ( Bennett 1983 ; Caldwell 1982 ; Lee et al. 1994 ). Under these circumstances the effects of fathers may be independent of the effects of mothers. Documentation of such independence constitutes a crucial theoretical advance in intergenerational studies, likely to motivate greater research on the mother and father roles.

Mothers and fathers may share similar attitudes. If their attitudes are extremely similar then it would be difficult to empirically distinguish independent influences of each. In this case, it would make sense to study parents’ attitudes, combined, as a predictor of children’s behaviors. This type of similarity might be expected given that spouses are typically matched on a wide range of characteristics before they marry ( Mare 1991 ). For example, married couples in Nepal typically come from the same or a similar caste, and caste standing is related to both culture and socioeconomic position. This similar positioning within the social system may lead to similar attitudes throughout parents’ young lives, up until marriage ( Bengtson 1975 ). After marriage they share similar experiences as a result of their shared lives: they reside within the same surroundings, they share neighbors and friends, and, furthermore, their attitudes likely influence one another. These similar and shared experiences, along with the transmission of attitudes through spousal communication, lead us to posit that each parent might have the same influence on children.

On the other hand, if mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes do not overlap completely, the attitudes of each parent may affect their child independently. Though they may be similar, no two people share the exact same experiences through their life course, and differences in background or events experienced may lead them to hold different attitudes. For example, a mother may come from a large family with many siblings, leading her to place value on having many children. Her husband, however, may have been raised in a smaller family, leading him to place less value on having many children. Moreover, the more gendered that social experiences are, the more independent we might expect husbands’ and wives’ attitudes to be ( Mason and Smith 2000 ). There is strong reason to believe that social life in rural Nepal is highly gendered ( Bennett 1983 ; Fricke 1986 ), creating substantial independence in the life experiences of husbands and wives. Thus, we investigate the independent effects of parents’ attitudes in order to determine these potentially independent consequences. In the following paragraphs we outline the reasons to expect both parents to influence sons. Because there are compelling reasons for each parent to be influential, we do not argue that either will be more influential than the other.

If parents’ attitudes are indeed different, we would expect fathers’ attitudes to have an important influence on their sons. First, children may be more likely to model their behaviors after the attitudes of their same-sex parent ( D’Angelo, Weinberger, and Feldman 1995 ; Starrels and Holm 2000 ; Treiman and Terrell 1975 ). For this reason, sons may more intentionally identify with and model after their fathers than their mothers ( Kaufman and Uhlenberg 1998 ). Second, they might exhibit behaviors more similar to fathers’ attitudes due to biological inheritance ( Udry 1995 ), which may be partly determined by the same-sex parent ( D’Angelo et al. 1995 ). Third, sons may develop attitudes more similar to their fathers than their mothers, as they are likely to have more exposure to similar kinds of gendered and non-family activities that their fathers are exposed to, such as employment, military service, and travel. Fourth, because men historically hold much of the decision-making authority in households ( Bennett 1983 ), sons may see their father as the authority figure and behave in accordance with their fathers’ attitudes.

We also have reason to believe that mothers’ attitudes will have an independent effect on sons’ behaviors. Mothers, in their role as caregivers and nurturers, generally spend more time with their young children than do fathers ( Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006 ). Because of this, children are likely to interact with their mothers as their primary source of socialization. Through this regular and constant interaction, sons will become aware of mothers’ attitudes and this may influence their behavior. This pattern has been found in the US, and there is reason to expect it in rural South Asia, where mothers are even more likely to be the primary caregivers for their children ( Bennett 1983 ; Lee et al. 1994 ; Paneru 1981 ). In fact, mothers may be closer with their sons in this setting, where men typically spend more time outside the home to provide financial support for the family. Mothers may focus on building especially close bonds with their sons so that they can ensure support for their future. For these reasons, mothers may have a strong influence on their sons.

Analytic implications: Both mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes are likely to influence sons’ behavior, although the influence from each parent may not necessarily be the same.

The relative influence of mothers and fathers may also vary across substantive domains. For example, an effect of mothers spending more time in caring for children than fathers is that mothers may have significant influence on their sons in the attitudinal domain related to childrearing. Compared to fathers, mothers are likely to both have stronger feelings about the ideal family size and to more adamantly impress these attitudes onto their sons. Likewise, sons may see mothers as having greater expertise than fathers in childrearing, so that mothers’ attitudes about family size may be treated with more credibility. Of course, for the reasons described above, fathers’ attitudes about ideal family size may affect their sons’ behaviors independent of the mothers’ attitudes, even in a domain associated with mothers.

Analytic implications: Both mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes in favor of childbearing are likely to speed sons’ marriage timing.

Just as mothers have expertise in the domain of childrearing, Nepalese fathers have expertise in the domain of sons’ responsibilities to care for elderly parents. This is because elderly parents in Nepal usually depend on sons for old age care. Thus, fathers are much more likely than mothers to have had personal experience with this responsibility for the care of their elderly parents, and, therefore, are more likely to be treated as experts in this substantive domain. As explained above, this experience is also quite likely to increase fathers’ appreciation for the role a wife can play in performing the actual caregiving tasks for his elderly parents. As a result, fathers may have an influence on their sons in this domain, speeding the sons’ acquisition of a wife.

There is some theoretical reason to expect that mothers’ attitude toward sons providing elderly care will have the opposite effect of fathers’ attitude. Both psychological theory ( Freud 1937 ) and research on relationship quality ( Rossi and Rossi 1990 ) point toward especially close and affectionate relationships between mothers and their sons. The rural Nepalese context is likely to heighten this. Virtually all mothers in Nepal breastfeed their sons for as long as they are lactating or until their next pregnancy, physically reinforcing these intense affectionate relationships ( Paneru 1981 ; Retherford et al. 1989 ). In fact, Nepalese language includes a saying common among men, “ Ama Ko Dhudh ko Bhara,” which means “the son can never repay the debt of mother’s milk”. The conflict between this intense mother-son relationship and the son’s relationship with his new bride is symbolized as the mother feeds yogurt to her son during his marriage ceremony ( Paneru 1981 ), signifying her last breastfeeding before giving him to his new bride. Though rural Nepalese mothers generally want their sons to marry and produce grandchildren, these mothers have reason to wish to delay their sons’ marriages.

Even more crucial for our context-specific reasoning, these maternal desires to slow their sons’ marriages are likely to be stronger when the expectation of old-age care from their sons is high. As social changes emphasizing the conjugal bond spread through settings like rural Nepal, maternal expectation for poorer quality relationships with their married sons than with their unmarried sons are likely to be exacerbated ( Allendorf 2009 ; Caldwell 1982 ; Niraula 1995 ; Paneru 1981 ). This expectation may not be limited to rural South Asian contexts—there is even some evidence that mothers in the US report less positive relationships and less care from their sons once sons are married ( Merrill 2011 ; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008 ). But in the rural Nepalese context, it is not surprising that mothers sometimes view their sons’ wives with competitive feelings, including concerns that the new wife may threaten a son’s willingness and ability to provide high quality old-age care ( Bennett 1983 ; Stone 1978 ; Watkins 1996 ). While a mother may transmit the idea that it is a woman’s task to provide caregiving—motivating sons to marry—she also transmits the preference for her son to delay marriage so that his caregiving remains focused on mother rather than wife.

Analytic implications: Mothers’ attitudes in favor of sons holding the responsibility of caring for their elderly parents may slow sons’ marriage timing, but fathers’ attitudes may lead sons to marry faster.

Sons’ Attitudes

As described above, sons’ attitudes are likely to be similar to their parents’ attitudes because parental socialization plays a powerful role in shaping young people’s attitudes and beliefs. There is also theoretical reason to expect that parents’ and sons’ attitudes have independent effects on sons’ behaviors. Three important mechanisms may produce independence of parent and child attitudes. First, though parents and children share similar surroundings and experience similar events, they are experiencing these things at different points in their life course. Having the same experience at a substantially different point in the life course is likely to yield differences in attitudes ( Elder 1975 ; Hagestad and Neugarten 1985 ). Second, macro-level changes can create considerable differences in social context between parental and child generations. Rapid growth in schooling, non-family work, government services, and mass media outlets in Nepal has created substantial differences between the contexts of parental life experience and their children’s life experience ( Axinn and Barber 2001 ; Axinn and Yabiku 2001 ). These differences between parents’ childhood experiences and children’s experiences are also likely to produce independence between parent and child attitudes. Third, the new experiences spreading in Nepal introduce ideas from outside of the parental home ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). Exposure to the media, schooling, and peer groups allow transmission of ideas to children that are different from parents’ ideas ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). For these reasons, we expect parents’ and sons’ attitudes to be different and to potentially have independent consequences for sons’ behaviors.

Analytic implications: Sons’ own attitudes are likely to influence their marriage timing, independent of their parents’ attitudes.

The Chitwan Valley Family Study CVFS offers measures from identical 72-minute individual interviews with both mothers and fathers, in addition to sons, allowing us to predict sons’ marriage timing over the subsequent ten years. Special care was taken during the data collection to interview mothers and fathers simultaneously in two different locations to enhance the independence of their responses. These detailed and comparable measures from parents provide an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the intergenerational influences from both mothers and fathers. 4

The CVFS includes a baseline interview, conducted in 1996, that consists of a structured questionnaire interview and a semi-structured Life History Calendar interview. These interviews collected information on both the attitudinal and experiential measures that we employ in our analyses. The CVFS interviewed all members of households aged 15–59 in sampled neighborhoods and their spouses (even if outside this age range or living elsewhere). The overall response rate was 97%. Beginning in 1997, monthly follow-up interviews were conducted that collected information about household members on a range of demographic events, including marriage. Drawing on the CVFS we analyze all the unmarried men, aged 15–17 in 1996, whose mother and father were both alive and interviewed in 1996 (n=205 son, mother, father triads) 5 . Sixteen of these sons have brothers in the sample. Our analysis follows their monthly hazard of marriage for 126 months. We study men aged 15–17 in 1996 because less than 4% of Nepali men under age 18 were married in 1996. This percentage climbs to 12% by age 18 and continues to rise rapidly thereafter. Thus, the rates of entering marriage are highest for this group of under-18-year-old males, maximizing our opportunity to examine the consequences of parental attitudes for marriage behavior ( Yabiku 2006 ).

Marriage Timing

We focus on first marriage, as remarriage in Nepal is a rare event ( Yabiku 2006 ). We use 126 months of data on marriage to operationalize the monthly hazard of marrying in discrete time. The discrete time approach yields results similar to a continuous approach because the incidence of marriage in any one month is quite low, but the discrete time approach allows us to avoid making any parametric assumptions regarding the distribution of the underlying baseline hazard ( Yamaguchi 1991 ). The measure of marriage is coded as 0 for every month in which the person is not married and 1 for the month in which the person marries, at which time they cease to contribute to person-months of exposure to risk of marriage.

Attitude Measures

Prior to fielding the 1996 study, great effort was taken to construct measures of attitudes specific to the rural Nepalese context. Five pilot studies were used in sequence with ethnographies and cognitive interviews to arrive at Nepalese language measures of core family attitudes. Some of these measures are often used in US studies of family attitudes and some are designed to be completely tailored to the Nepalese context. The attitudinal measures in this round of the study were deliberately designed to represent specific attitudes and not broad ideational domains. A second round of the CVFS attitude survey was conducted in 2008, with the aim of measuring attitudes that fit into broad ideational domains. In 2008, the CVFS also repeated the 1996 baseline measures designed to measure specific attitudes about specific behaviors. Results from factor analyses of these 2008 measures reveal that the 1996 specific measures repeated in 2008 do not load strongly with broader attitudinal domains. What we present here are English language translations of the two specific attitude items from the 1996 Nepalese instrument. The original Nepalese question wordings and response alternatives can be found at {perl.psc.isr.umich.edu}.

Ideal Family Size

We use the most widely investigated measure of ideal family size: the Coombs scale ( Axinn, Clarkberg, and Thornton 1994 ; Coombs 1974 , 1978 , 1979 ). This measure indicates the number of children that respondents want to have and is calculated based on responses to a series of questions. Respondents were first asked how many children they would want if they could have the exact number they wanted. Respondents who already had children were asked how many children they would like to have if they could start life over. They were then asked a series of follow-up questions, indicating whether they would prefer fewer or more children if they were unable to have the exact number previously indicated. The Coombs scale has been found to produce the most accurate indicator of fertility preferences compared to other survey measures ( Coombs 1974 , 1978 , 1979 ). On the single-item measure of ideal family size, a majority of people in the CVFS (60%) report a preference for exactly two children. The Coombs scale measure produces variance in responses, pushing respondents to report whether they would prefer a minimum of two children or a maximum of two children. This variance allows for high accuracy in estimating the effects that family size preference has on marriage timing ( Barber and Axinn 1998 ).

Responses are coded into a scale with values ranging from 1–25, with a higher value indicating a preference for more children. For example, a respondent who says he prefers two children, and two is the maximum number of children he would prefer, receives a code of 4, as compared to a code of 7 for a respondent who says that two is the minimum number of children he would prefer. See Figure 1 for an illustration of the coding scheme. Among the CVFS sample, those who have higher values on the Coombs scale have a greater desire for more children (single-item measure correlates at r=0.92), actually have more children (achieved fertility correlates at r=0.33 among those ever married), and prefer a younger age at marriage (ideal age at marriage correlates at r=−0.16). As shown in Table 1 , the mean value is 7.80 for mothers, with a standard deviation of 2.90, and 7.54 for fathers, with a standard deviation of 3.17. The mean value for sons is lower, at 5.96, with a standard deviation of 1.65. Mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes are not strongly or significantly correlated, at r=0.07. The correlations between mothers’ and sons’ attitudes and fathers’ and sons’ attitudes are also weak and insignificant, at r=0.09 and r=0.07, respectively.

Descriptive Statistics

Responsibility for Old-Age Care of Parents

Our measurement of attitudes about sons caring for their parents in old age comes from a survey item that was specifically developed and tested for this Nepalese population. Respondents were asked: “Some people think that a married son should take care of his parents in their older age. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, or don’t agree at all?” The item was coded from 1–3, so that a higher value indicates a more positive attitude. Mothers and fathers have similar mean values on this measure, at 2.31 and 2.25, respectively, with a standard deviation of 0.79 for each. Sons’ mean value is slightly greater, at 2.54, with a standard deviation of 0.62. Mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes are not strongly correlated, however, at r=0.13. Parents’ attitudes are not strongly nor significantly correlated with sons’ attitudes, at r=−0.07 for mothers and sons, and r=0.03 for fathers and sons. 6

We control for a range of parental characteristics that may influence both parents’ attitudes and sons’ marriage timing. 7 First, we control for parents’ marital experiences, starting with whether parents had an arranged marriage. A scale ranging from 1–5 was created to indicate the level of choice that mothers and fathers had in their marriage, from having no choice of their spouse (1) to having complete choice (5) ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). We use the mean of this scale for full models that include both mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes because, although they are in the same marriage, husbands and wives often have different levels of choice in their spouse. We also control for parents’ age at marriage. Again, in the full models, we use the mean of mothers’ and fathers’ age at marriage.

Next, we control for parents’ experiences with non-family activities. We use an indicator of each parent’s years of education to control for the first generation’s educational attainment. We use the mean of mothers’ and fathers’ years of education in the full models. We also control for whether parents ever worked. In the full models, we use a variable that is the sum of two dummy variables, again reported by parents themselves, indicating whether the mother and/or father ever worked for pay outside of the home. Many mechanisms link parents’ education and work to both their own attitudes and their children’s marital timing ( Thornton et al. 2007 ; Yabiku 2005 ).

We also control for key indicators of family circumstances that may shape both parental attitudes and sons’ marital timing. First, we control for the ethnicity of the family using dummy variables for the different ethnic groups in Chitwan: Bhramin/Chhetri, Dalit, Newars, Terai Indigenous, and Hill Indigenous 8 . In our analyses, Bhramin/Chhetri is the reference category to which the other ethnic groups are compared. Second, we control for the community context in which families resided in 1995. Following the practice of previously published research using these data, community context is measured with a neighborhood-level indicator that is the sum of the number of services – bus stop, health center, employer, school, and/or market – that are within a five-minute walk of respondents’ neighborhood ( Axinn and Yabiku 2001 ; Yabiku 2004 , 2006 ). Third, we also control for sons’ age in 1996. Fourth, we control for the presence of an unmarried brother in the household. This measure also serves to account for assignment of the same parents to multiple sons in our sample. Fifth, we control for the respondents’ birth order. Both birth order and having a coresident brother can influence parental motivations for a particular son to marry in this setting. 9 , 10

Finally, in order to control for the duration of exposure to marriage risk we use a control for time, which is the duration of time, in months, since the first monthly interview. Previous research shows this functional form fits the baseline hazard of marriage in Nepal well ( Yabiku 2004 , 2005 , 2006 ).

Analytic Approach

We employ discrete-time event history analysis to model the risk of marriage, with person-months of exposure as the unit of analysis ( Peterson 1993 ). We use multilevel logistic regression to account for the clustering of the CVFS sampling design at the neighborhood level. We estimate the monthly hazard of marrying, controlling for key family and parental characteristics as discussed above ( Barber et al. 2000 ). Our logistic regression analyses produce multiplicative coefficients. We discuss the results as odds ratios, which is the anti-log of the coefficient. These odds ratios can be interpreted as the amount by which the odds are multiplied for each unit change in the respective independent variable. If the odds ratio is greater than 1, the effect is positive and if the odds are less than 1, the effect is negative. We test our unidirectional hypotheses for attitudinal influences using one-tailed tests of significance and we test the control measures using two-tailed tests of significance.

We begin by investigating the consequences of attitudes toward childbearing, then move on to an investigation of attitudes about responsibility for old-age care. We present both models with each family member’s attitudes analyzed separately and models in which all three family members’ attitudes are analyzed together. In separate estimates (not shown here), we find results consistent with the planned behavior/reasoned action framework: sons’ attitudes toward the ideal age for men to marry predict sons’ marriage timing. However, those analyses do not reveal any direct effects of parents’ attitudes about the ideal age for men to marry. This result highlights the importance of investigating different specific attitudes to advance our understanding of intergenerational associations. Below we focus on the specific substantive domains in which context-specific reasoning predicts intergenerational associations.

Attitudes about Ideal Family Size

Table 2 displays the odds ratios from models estimating the effects of attitudes about ideal family size on the hazard of first marriage. Because the theoretical expectations outlined for parents’ and sons’ attitudes are unidirectional, we test the influences of these attitudes with one-tailed tests. As expected, we find that mothers’ attitude in this domain does have a substantial positive association with sons’ subsequent marriage timing that is independent of the effect of fathers’ or sons’ attitudes. In fact, mothers’ attitude has a significant positive association both when included as the sole attitude to predict sons’ marriage timing ( Table 2 , Model 1) and when included in a model with fathers’ and sons’ attitudes ( Table 2 , Model 4). When included in the full model with other family members’ attitudes, mothers’ attitude in favor of large families speeds sons’ marriage by 14% for each unit increase on the Coombs scale. Because the Coombs scale has a large range, this association is substantial: a 6-point increase in mothers’ attitude (e.g., the difference between wanting two children at most and wanting three children at least) leads sons to marrying 2.19 times faster. Thus, the association of mothers’ attitude about desired family size with sons’ marriage timing is substantively large, statistically significant, independent of fathers’ attitude, and not explained by including sons’ own attitude in the model.

Odds Ratios from Logistic Regression Estimates of Attitudes Predicting the Hazard of Sons’ First Marriages (Sons aged 15–17 in 1996)

Note: Estimates are presented as odds ratios. T-ratios are given in parentheses.

Fathers also have a positive influence in this domain, though the magnitude of the association with fathers’ attitude is not statistically different from the association with mothers’ attitude. 11 In the full model ( Table 2 , Model 4) each unit increase on fathers’ Coombs scale increases the hazard of sons marrying by approximately 7%. This effect is again substantial: a 6-point increase in fathers’ attitude on the Coombs scale leads sons to marry 1.50 times faster. As is the case with mothers, fathers’ attitude has a significant association that is independent of mothers’ attitude, and unexplained by sons’ own attitude.

Sons’ attitude, on the other hand, does not have independent associations with marriage timing in this domain. This is true in both the models using only sons’ attitude to predict their marriage timing ( Table 2 , Model 3) and in the full models. These results are consistent with the conclusion that sons whose parents want larger families will marry faster, independent of sons’ own attitude.

As discussed above, sons with mothers who prefer larger families are motivated to marry more quickly so that they can begin childbearing. Mothers’ attitudes related to childbearing have been found to have a similar socializing influence on their children’s marriage timing in the US ( Barber and Axinn 1998 ). In this radically different Nepalese setting we find the same result. However, measures to compare the consequences of mothers’ and fathers’ childbearing attitudes are not available from the US. In the Nepalese setting we find that fathers’ childbearing attitudes also have significant association with their sons’ marriage timing independent of mothers’ and sons’ attitudes. This result is consistent with our hypothesis that attitudes of both parents have the potential for independent influences on their children’s marital behavior.

Many of the controls have independent associations with sons’ marriage timing, as well. The sons of parents who experienced more participation in spouse choice and of mothers who have had work experience marry more quickly. On the other hand, sons of mothers who married at older ages and of parents who have more education marry more slowly. Sons’ own characteristics are also associated with their marriage timing. Their sibling composition has an important influence: both having more siblings and having a coresident brother slows their rate of marriage. This result may indicate that sons experience less pressure to marry if they have siblings to absorb some of that pressure. Finally, the parameters we use to specify the baseline hazard are also significant.

Attitudes about Old-Age Care

Based on the highly gendered relationships between each parent and their son in this setting, we expect the independent associations of specific parental attitudes may have opposing consequences for marital timing in the domain of old-age support. The results of our analyses are consistent with this expectation. Mothers’ attitude about old-age care slows the rate of sons’ marriages (though not statistically significant in Model 1, Table 3 ), but fathers’ attitude about old-age care speeds the rate of sons’ marriages ( Table 3 ). When these two opposing forces are estimated in the same model (Model 4, Table 3 ), both associations are statistically significant and substantial, though the measurement metric for this attitude only has three units. A one-unit increase in mothers’ belief that sons should care for parents reduces sons’ marriage rate by 21%, but a one-unit increase in fathers’ belief increases sons’ marriage rate by 50%. Also interesting, in this domain sons’ own attitude appears to have independent consequences for their rate of marriage in a similar magnitude as fathers’ attitude. A one-unit increase in sons’ belief that sons should care for elderly parents increases their marriage rate by 51% ( Table 3 , Model 4).

To investigate whether this attitude has independent associations from attitude about ideal family size, we tested a model in which both attitudes for all three family members were included (not shown). The direction and significance of each family member’s attitudes did not change compared to the final models presented in Tables 2 and ​ and3. 3 . Thus, the two attitudes are independently associated with sons’ marriage timing. 12

The statistical independence of the consequences of these three different family members’ attitudes toward the same specific topic – sons’ care for their parents in old age – highlights the complexity of these ideational influences on behavior even within a single substantive domain. Sons’ marriage timing responds similarly to both fathers’ and sons’ attitudes about old-age care. The independence of these two estimates is important. It means that, while substantial socialization may produce this similarity, paternal attitudes can have an influence independent of sons’ own attitudes, even when sons’ attitudes are quite relevant to the outcome. Both fathers and sons may anticipate the advantages of adding a wife to the family if sons are responsible for providing old-age care to their parents, but each person exerts an independent influence on sons’ marriage timing. Parental social control mechanisms are likely in play even when the fathers’ and sons’ motivations are in the same direction. As a result, the sum of these two independent associations is that sons who both expect to care for elderly parents and have fathers who expect them to provide such care marry much more rapidly than other sons.

By contrast, mothers’ positive attitude about sons providing old-age support slows their sons’ marriages. This opposing consequence of mothers’ attitude is both independent of and statistically different from the consequences of both fathers’ and sons’ own attitudes on this topic. It may be that the potential competition between mothers and their daughters-in-law leads mothers who expect their sons to provide their old-age care to be apprehensive about bringing a new wife into the household. Historically, daughters-in-law have been an important source of labor for young men’s mothers ( Bennett 1983 ). However, more recent years have been characterized by more affection-based relationships between men and their new wives ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ), which may change the way that mothers-in-law feel about daughters-in-law. With this type of marriage on the rise, mothers may perceive that married sons will put more effort toward caring for their wives than their mothers ( Bennett 1983 ; Stone 1978 ; Watkins 1996 ). If this is the case, mothers who expect old-age care from their sons may actually have a motivation to slow their sons’ marriages. More investigation of this intriguing result is required to determine the mechanisms responsible for this observed association.

In the context of our investigation, this result demonstrates two crucial points. First, mothers’ attitudes can have a socializing influence on their sons’ behaviors independent of both fathers’ attitudes and sons’ own attitudes. In spite of assortative marriages of mothers and fathers, parental socialization of their children, and a shared social environment, there are enough differences in experience and circumstances to produce independence in the consequences of these three different family members’ specific attitudes. Second, mothers’ attitudes may actually shape sons’ behavior in the opposite direction of fathers’ attitudes on the same topic. In this particular context, with respect to an attitude about a specific behavior, even when mothers and fathers agree on the topic, the consequences for their sons’ behavior can be in opposing directions.

We use innovative measures from multiple family members to estimate the influence of parents’ attitudes on sons’ marriage timing. We find that parental influences are strong in rural Nepal, as in other parts of the world with more individualistic and less collectivist orientations ( Liefbroer and de Jong Gierveld 1993 ; Sewell et al. 1975 ; Thompson, Alexander, and Entwisle 1988 ; Whitbeck, Simons, and Kao 1994 ). A major limitation of previous research on the influence of parental attitudes on their children’s behavior is the absence of measures of attitudes directly from fathers to compare with mothers ( Forum on Child and Family Statistics 1998 ; Thornton 2001 ). Our results reveal that both mothers and fathers can simultaneously influence their sons, and these influences can be in opposing directions.

Theoretically, we identify setting-specific mechanisms likely to produce not only independence in the consequences of mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes, but for some specific attitudes, consequences in opposing directions. Parental attitudes toward childbearing constitute an important influence in children’s marriage timing ( Barber and Axinn 1998 ; Thornton et al. 2007 ). In this setting, we have reason to expect mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes to each have an independent influence. But we also have strong reasons to expect parental expectations for care from children in old age to be an important influence on children’s marital timing. With no other institutional forms of old-age care, children and their families are the exclusive source of protection, support, and care for the elderly in Nepal ( Bennett 1983 ; Brauner-Otto 2009 ; Fricke 1986 ). However, the role of a new daughter-in-law in helping a son provide that care is differentiated by the gender of the parent – mothers may feel competition for sons’ care, but for fathers this competition is unlikely ( Merrill 2011 ; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008 ). For this reason, we argue that parental attitudes toward children’s care of the elderly will be consequential in Nepal, but in opposing directions.

Empirically, we find that associations between fathers’ attitudes and sons’ behavior are independent of associations between mothers’ attitudes and sons’ behavior. In the domain of ideal family size these independent associations are in the same direction, but in the domain of old-age care they are in opposing directions. Fathers’ positive attitudes toward sons’ care of elderly parents speeds sons’ marriage timing, but mothers’ positive attitudes toward sons’ care of elderly parents slows sons’ marriage timing. This finding is consistent with our reasoning that fathers with a strong belief in sons’ responsibility for old-age care focus on the advantage of having a daughter-in-law to perform caregiving tasks, whereas mothers with the same belief are more hesitant to admit a new wife into the home who may reduce the quality of the mother-son relationship ( Merrill 2011 ; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008 ). These associations are important to worldwide consideration of parental influences on children’s behavior because they demonstrate that mothers and fathers not only have the potential for independent influences on their children, but these influences can be in opposing directions.

Why is the study of parental influences on marriage timing in Nepal relevant to scientists studying marriage and family in any other setting, especially settings as different as the United States or Western Europe? Actually, the remote Himalayan setting provides a comparative perspective on intergenerational family dynamics, making it exceptionally relevant to all research on these topics. First, our findings reveal the importance of employing specific attitudes to study parental influences on behavioral outcomes across a wide range of social, economic, and cultural circumstances. Specific parental attitudes influence children’s behavior independent of the children’s own attitudes, consistent with both substantial social control mechanisms and broad socialization that reaches beyond a single specific attitude ( Barber 2000 , 2001 ; Gecas and Seff 1990 ; Smith 1988 ). This appears just as true in Nepal as in the US, and it is likely true in every social, economic, and cultural circumstance in between – and probably those not “in-between” as well.

Second, we document that attitudes about family behaviors other than marriage can have an important influence on marriage behavior in a radically different setting. Evidence from the US demonstrates that one of these attitudes – the attitude toward childbearing – accelerates children’s marriage just as it does in this analysis of Nepal ( Barber and Axinn 1998 ). In the US, parental attitudes on topics like education and work also influence marriage timing ( Thornton et al. 2007 ). In Nepal we find attitudes about old age care do, too. This means that a substantively wide range of specific parental attitudes can be important in predicting any particular child behavior across a wide range of settings. Moreover, they may be different attitudes in different settings or populations. This is all consistent with theory ( Ajzen 1988 ; Barber 2001 ), but empirically the door is wide open – all manner of specific attitudes may be highly relevant, depending on the specific behavior and setting.

Third, by adding direct measures of both mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes we are able to compare the role of each parent’s attitudes. Our results reveal that each parent has a substantial independent influence on their sons’ marriage timing, but that both the magnitude and direction of the influence varies depending on the specific substantive domain. Because Western literature also reveals a strong parental influence, this result motivates the expansion of family studies in these individualistic contexts to consider the individual pressure that each parent may exert on their children. These results also motivate advances toward the consideration of specific family relationships in intergenerational influences, adding substantial complexity. The attitudes of many other closely-connected people – including not only the individual and his or her parents, but also siblings, other relatives, and close friends—deserve careful investigation. Again, the implications for research across all settings are mammoth: multiple different others’ attitudes may be simultaneously relevant to each specific behavioral decision, but perhaps differently in different settings.

Though the context-, attitude-, and relationship-specific nature of our investigation inherently poses a limitation to the generalizability of our findings, the findings point toward many new, high priority topics of investigation. Parallel investigations of specific attitudes juxtaposing comparable measures from mothers and fathers across a wider range of settings are among the highest priorities. Even in comparable settings, future investigations of similar models of daughters’ behaviors have the potential to contribute greatly to our understanding of same-sex parenting. Our findings point toward substantial complexity in these intergenerational and ideational influences on behavior. Nevertheless, a clearer understanding of the independent consequences of mothers’ and fathers’ ideas has the potential to significantly advance models of parental influences on children.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (grant numbers HD032912 and HD007339) and the National Science Foundation (grant number OISE 0729709). We would like to thank the Institute for Social and Environmental Research in Chitwan, Nepal for collecting the data used here; Keera Allendorf for sharing supplemental data analyses; Scott Yabiku for reading an earlier version of this paper; anonymous reviewers for their careful comments; and Cathy Sun and Daniel Thompson for assisting with data management. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the authors.

1 As of 1995/2000, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for women in Nepal was 4.4 and dropped to 2.9 by 2011 ( Population Reference Bureau 2011 ; United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2011 ). There is a preference for sons ( Stash 1996 ), although the sex ratio at birth is near the expected value, at 105 ( Leone, Matthews, and Dalla Zuanna 2003 ).

2 The characteristics of the Chitwan Valley, cited here, also closely match the national trends in Nepal, as documented elsewhere ( Barber et al 1997 ; Pradhan et al. 1997 ).

3 As an indicator of the timing of parental need for old age care, statistics from the United Nations indicate that the life expectancy at birth in Nepal for the period 1995–2000 was 59 and 60 years for males and females, respectively ( United Nations, Statistics Division 2008 ).

4 Access to the CVFS data may be obtained through the Inter-Consortium for Political and Social Research ICPSR ( www.icpsr.umich.edu ).

5 We analyze 98% of the 210 eligible triads in the CVFS data. Five cases are excluded because of missing data. We tested imputation alternatives, but consistent with the few cases involved, these alternatives yield the same results as presented in our tables.

6 The attitudes about ideal family size and the responsibility of sons to care for parents in their old age are not strongly correlated. For sons, the two attitudes correlate at r=0.17 with p<.05. For mothers and fathers, the correlations are nonsignificant, at r=0.06 and r=0.11, respectively.

7 We test models for mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes separately as well as together in one full model. For the separate models, we control only for the characteristic of the parent whose attitude we are investigating. In the full models and the models of only sons’ attitudes, we control for the combined characteristics of parents, as both parents’ characteristics are hypothesized to exert influence on sons’ marriage timing.

8 In designing the CVFS, the Chitwan area was specifically chosen as a study site to produce a research design with strong diversity by Nepalese ethnicity, without complex oversampling.

9 Expectations for sons’ care of parents vary systematically across ethnic groups in Nepal: a key reason we include ethnicity as a control. Historically, Nepalese expected sons to remain living with or near their parents and to care for them in their old age, and this pressure was often highest for the eldest son ( Bennett 1983 ). Recent social changes in Nepal greatly enhance sons’ independence and variance across families ( Ghimire et al. 2006 ). We tested models with interactions for birth order and presence of a brother and found they are not significant.

10 In analyses not shown, we also controlled for parents’ age at first birth and their total number of children (which is highly correlated with birth order). Including these controls does not change our results.

11 This was tested by calculating the 95% confidence intervals around the coefficient.

12 We also ran the models with mean measures of neighbors’ attitudes for each attitudinal domain. This does not weaken the independent influence of parents’ attitudes.

Contributor Information

Elyse A. Jennings, University of Michigan.

William G. Axinn, University of Michigan.

Dirgha J. Ghimire, University of Michigan.

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In some cultures, the parents arrange marriages for their children but in others, children choose their marriage partner. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each system?

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To get an excellent score in the IELTS Task 2 writing section, one of the easiest and most effective tips is structuring your writing in the most solid format. A great argument essay structure may be divided to four paragraphs, in which comprises of four sentences (excluding the conclusion paragraph, which comprises of three sentences).

For we to consider an essay structure a great one, it should be looking like this:

• Paragraph 1 - Introduction
• Sentence 1 - Background statement
• Sentence 2 - Detailed background statement
• Sentence 3 - Thesis
• Sentence 4 - Outline sentence
• Paragraph 2 - First supporting paragraph
• Sentence 1 - Topic sentence
• Sentence 2 - Example
• Sentence 3 - Discussion
• Sentence 4 - Conclusion
• Paragraph 3 - Second supporting paragraph
• Paragraph 4 - Conclusion
• Sentence 1 - Summary
• Sentence 2 - Restatement of thesis
• Sentence 3 - Prediction or recommendation

Our recommended essay structure above comprises of fifteen (15) sentences, which will make your essay approximately 250 to 275 words.

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Some children spend hours every day on their smartphones. Why is this case? Do you think this iş a positive or negatife development

In some countries, children start school at the age of four, while in other countries they start at seven. what is the ideal age for a child to begin formal education, in the modern world, it is possible to shop, work and communicate with poeple via internet and live without any face-to-face contact with others. is it a positive or nagative development, in many countries, the quality of life in the large cities is worsening. what possibly can cause this problem what measures can be taken to resolve it, study shows that many criminals have a low level education. for this reason, some people believe that the best way to reduce crime is to educate people in prison, so that they can get a job when they leave prison. do you agree or disagree.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how to write an a+ argumentative essay.

Miscellaneous

You'll no doubt have to write a number of argumentative essays in both high school and college, but what, exactly, is an argumentative essay and how do you write the best one possible? Let's take a look.

A great argumentative essay always combines the same basic elements: approaching an argument from a rational perspective, researching sources, supporting your claims using facts rather than opinion, and articulating your reasoning into the most cogent and reasoned points. Argumentative essays are great building blocks for all sorts of research and rhetoric, so your teachers will expect you to master the technique before long.

But if this sounds daunting, never fear! We'll show how an argumentative essay differs from other kinds of papers, how to research and write them, how to pick an argumentative essay topic, and where to find example essays. So let's get started.

What Is an Argumentative Essay? How Is it Different from Other Kinds of Essays?

There are two basic requirements for any and all essays: to state a claim (a thesis statement) and to support that claim with evidence.

Though every essay is founded on these two ideas, there are several different types of essays, differentiated by the style of the writing, how the writer presents the thesis, and the types of evidence used to support the thesis statement.

Essays can be roughly divided into four different types:

#1: Argumentative #2: Persuasive #3: Expository #4: Analytical

So let's look at each type and what the differences are between them before we focus the rest of our time to argumentative essays.

Argumentative Essay

Argumentative essays are what this article is all about, so let's talk about them first.

An argumentative essay attempts to convince a reader to agree with a particular argument (the writer's thesis statement). The writer takes a firm stand one way or another on a topic and then uses hard evidence to support that stance.

An argumentative essay seeks to prove to the reader that one argument —the writer's argument— is the factually and logically correct one. This means that an argumentative essay must use only evidence-based support to back up a claim , rather than emotional or philosophical reasoning (which is often allowed in other types of essays). Thus, an argumentative essay has a burden of substantiated proof and sources , whereas some other types of essays (namely persuasive essays) do not.

You can write an argumentative essay on any topic, so long as there's room for argument. Generally, you can use the same topics for both a persuasive essay or an argumentative one, so long as you support the argumentative essay with hard evidence.

Example topics of an argumentative essay:

• "Should farmers be allowed to shoot wolves if those wolves injure or kill farm animals?"
• "Should the drinking age be lowered in the United States?"
• "Are alternatives to democracy effective and/or feasible to implement?"

The next three types of essays are not argumentative essays, but you may have written them in school. We're going to cover them so you know what not to do for your argumentative essay.

Persuasive Essay

Persuasive essays are similar to argumentative essays, so it can be easy to get them confused. But knowing what makes an argumentative essay different than a persuasive essay can often mean the difference between an excellent grade and an average one.

Persuasive essays seek to persuade a reader to agree with the point of view of the writer, whether that point of view is based on factual evidence or not. The writer has much more flexibility in the evidence they can use, with the ability to use moral, cultural, or opinion-based reasoning as well as factual reasoning to persuade the reader to agree the writer's side of a given issue.

Instead of being forced to use "pure" reason as one would in an argumentative essay, the writer of a persuasive essay can manipulate or appeal to the reader's emotions. So long as the writer attempts to steer the readers into agreeing with the thesis statement, the writer doesn't necessarily need hard evidence in favor of the argument.

Often, you can use the same topics for both a persuasive essay or an argumentative one—the difference is all in the approach and the evidence you present.

Example topics of a persuasive essay:

• "Should children be responsible for their parents' debts?"
• "Should cheating on a test be automatic grounds for expulsion?"
• "How much should sports leagues be held accountable for player injuries and the long-term consequences of those injuries?"

Expository Essay

An expository essay is typically a short essay in which the writer explains an idea, issue, or theme , or discusses the history of a person, place, or idea.

This is typically a fact-forward essay with little argument or opinion one way or the other.

Example topics of an expository essay:

• "The History of the Philadelphia Liberty Bell"
• "The Reasons I Always Wanted to be a Doctor"
• "The Meaning Behind the Colloquialism ‘People in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones'"

Analytical Essay

An analytical essay seeks to delve into the deeper meaning of a text or work of art, or unpack a complicated idea . These kinds of essays closely interpret a source and look into its meaning by analyzing it at both a macro and micro level.

This type of analysis can be augmented by historical context or other expert or widely-regarded opinions on the subject, but is mainly supported directly through the original source (the piece or art or text being analyzed) .

Example topics of an analytical essay:

• "Victory Gin in Place of Water: The Symbolism Behind Gin as the Only Potable Substance in George Orwell's 1984"
• "Amarna Period Art: The Meaning Behind the Shift from Rigid to Fluid Poses"
• "Adultery During WWII, as Told Through a Series of Letters to and from Soldiers"

There are many different types of essay and, over time, you'll be able to master them all.

A Typical Argumentative Essay Assignment

The average argumentative essay is between three to five pages, and will require at least three or four separate sources with which to back your claims . As for the essay topic , you'll most often be asked to write an argumentative essay in an English class on a "general" topic of your choice, ranging the gamut from science, to history, to literature.

But while the topics of an argumentative essay can span several different fields, the structure of an argumentative essay is always the same: you must support a claim—a claim that can reasonably have multiple sides—using multiple sources and using a standard essay format (which we'll talk about later on).

This is why many argumentative essay topics begin with the word "should," as in:

• "Should all students be required to learn chemistry in high school?"
• "Should children be required to learn a second language?"
• "Should schools or governments be allowed to ban books?"

These topics all have at least two sides of the argument: Yes or no. And you must support the side you choose with evidence as to why your side is the correct one.

But there are also plenty of other ways to frame an argumentative essay as well:

• "Does using social media do more to benefit or harm people?"
• "Does the legal status of artwork or its creators—graffiti and vandalism, pirated media, a creator who's in jail—have an impact on the art itself?"
• "Is or should anyone ever be ‘above the law?'"

Though these are worded differently than the first three, you're still essentially forced to pick between two sides of an issue: yes or no, for or against, benefit or detriment. Though your argument might not fall entirely into one side of the divide or another—for instance, you could claim that social media has positively impacted some aspects of modern life while being a detriment to others—your essay should still support one side of the argument above all. Your final stance would be that overall , social media is beneficial or overall , social media is harmful.

If your argument is one that is mostly text-based or backed by a single source (e.g., "How does Salinger show that Holden Caulfield is an unreliable narrator?" or "Does Gatsby personify the American Dream?"), then it's an analytical essay, rather than an argumentative essay. An argumentative essay will always be focused on more general topics so that you can use multiple sources to back up your claims.

Good Argumentative Essay Topics

So you know the basic idea behind an argumentative essay, but what topic should you write about?

Again, almost always, you'll be asked to write an argumentative essay on a free topic of your choice, or you'll be asked to select between a few given topics . If you're given complete free reign of topics, then it'll be up to you to find an essay topic that no only appeals to you, but that you can turn into an A+ argumentative essay.

What makes a "good" argumentative essay topic depends on both the subject matter and your personal interest —it can be hard to give your best effort on something that bores you to tears! But it can also be near impossible to write an argumentative essay on a topic that has no room for debate.

As we said earlier, a good argumentative essay topic will be one that has the potential to reasonably go in at least two directions—for or against, yes or no, and why . For example, it's pretty hard to write an argumentative essay on whether or not people should be allowed to murder one another—not a whole lot of debate there for most people!—but writing an essay for or against the death penalty has a lot more wiggle room for evidence and argument.

A good topic is also one that can be substantiated through hard evidence and relevant sources . So be sure to pick a topic that other people have studied (or at least studied elements of) so that you can use their data in your argument. For example, if you're arguing that it should be mandatory for all middle school children to play a sport, you might have to apply smaller scientific data points to the larger picture you're trying to justify. There are probably several studies you could cite on the benefits of physical activity and the positive effect structure and teamwork has on young minds, but there's probably no study you could use where a group of scientists put all middle-schoolers in one jurisdiction into a mandatory sports program (since that's probably never happened). So long as your evidence is relevant to your point and you can extrapolate from it to form a larger whole, you can use it as a part of your resource material.

And if you need ideas on where to get started, or just want to see sample argumentative essay topics, then check out these links for hundreds of potential argumentative essay topics.

101 Persuasive (or Argumentative) Essay and Speech Topics

301 Prompts for Argumentative Writing

Top 50 Ideas for Argumentative/Persuasive Essay Writing

[Note: some of these say "persuasive essay topics," but just remember that the same topic can often be used for both a persuasive essay and an argumentative essay; the difference is in your writing style and the evidence you use to support your claims.]

KO! Find that one argumentative essay topic you can absolutely conquer.

Argumentative Essay Format

Argumentative Essays are composed of four main elements:

• A position (your argument)
• Your reasons
• Supporting evidence for those reasons (from reliable sources)
• Counterargument(s) (possible opposing arguments and reasons why those arguments are incorrect)

If you're familiar with essay writing in general, then you're also probably familiar with the five paragraph essay structure . This structure is a simple tool to show how one outlines an essay and breaks it down into its component parts, although it can be expanded into as many paragraphs as you want beyond the core five.

The standard argumentative essay is often 3-5 pages, which will usually mean a lot more than five paragraphs, but your overall structure will look the same as a much shorter essay.

An argumentative essay at its simplest structure will look like:

Paragraph 1: Intro

• Set up the story/problem/issue
• Thesis/claim

Paragraph 2: Support

• Reason #1 claim is correct
• Supporting evidence with sources

Paragraph 3: Support

• Reason #2 claim is correct

Paragraph 4: Counterargument

• Explanation of argument for the other side
• Refutation of opposing argument with supporting evidence

Paragraph 5: Conclusion

• Re-state claim
• Sum up reasons and support of claim from the essay to prove claim is correct

Now let's unpack each of these paragraph types to see how they work (with examples!), what goes into them, and why.

Paragraph 1—Set Up and Claim

Your first task is to introduce the reader to the topic at hand so they'll be prepared for your claim. Give a little background information, set the scene, and give the reader some stakes so that they care about the issue you're going to discuss.

Next, you absolutely must have a position on an argument and make that position clear to the readers. It's not an argumentative essay unless you're arguing for a specific claim, and this claim will be your thesis statement.

Your thesis CANNOT be a mere statement of fact (e.g., "Washington DC is the capital of the United States"). Your thesis must instead be an opinion which can be backed up with evidence and has the potential to be argued against (e.g., "New York should be the capital of the United States").

Paragraphs 2 and 3—Your Evidence

These are your body paragraphs in which you give the reasons why your argument is the best one and back up this reasoning with concrete evidence .

The argument supporting the thesis of an argumentative essay should be one that can be supported by facts and evidence, rather than personal opinion or cultural or religious mores.

For example, if you're arguing that New York should be the new capital of the US, you would have to back up that fact by discussing the factual contrasts between New York and DC in terms of location, population, revenue, and laws. You would then have to talk about the precedents for what makes for a good capital city and why New York fits the bill more than DC does.

Your argument can't simply be that a lot of people think New York is the best city ever and that you agree.

In addition to using concrete evidence, you always want to keep the tone of your essay passionate, but impersonal . Even though you're writing your argument from a single opinion, don't use first person language—"I think," "I feel," "I believe,"—to present your claims. Doing so is repetitive, since by writing the essay you're already telling the audience what you feel, and using first person language weakens your writing voice.

For example,

"I think that Washington DC is no longer suited to be the capital city of the United States."

"Washington DC is no longer suited to be the capital city of the United States."

The second statement sounds far stronger and more analytical.

Paragraph 4—Argument for the Other Side and Refutation

Even without a counter argument, you can make a pretty persuasive claim, but a counterargument will round out your essay into one that is much more persuasive and substantial.

By anticipating an argument against your claim and taking the initiative to counter it, you're allowing yourself to get ahead of the game. This way, you show that you've given great thought to all sides of the issue before choosing your position, and you demonstrate in multiple ways how yours is the more reasoned and supported side.

Paragraph 5—Conclusion

This paragraph is where you re-state your argument and summarize why it's the best claim.

Briefly touch on your supporting evidence and voila! A finished argumentative essay.

Your essay should have just as awesome a skeleton as this plesiosaur does. (In other words: a ridiculously awesome skeleton)

Argumentative Essay Example: 5-Paragraph Style

It always helps to have an example to learn from. I've written a full 5-paragraph argumentative essay here. Look at how I state my thesis in paragraph 1, give supporting evidence in paragraphs 2 and 3, address a counterargument in paragraph 4, and conclude in paragraph 5.

Topic: Is it possible to maintain conflicting loyalties?

Paragraph 1

It is almost impossible to go through life without encountering a situation where your loyalties to different people or causes come into conflict with each other. Maybe you have a loving relationship with your sister, but she disagrees with your decision to join the army, or you find yourself torn between your cultural beliefs and your scientific ones. These conflicting loyalties can often be maintained for a time, but as examples from both history and psychological theory illustrate, sooner or later, people have to make a choice between competing loyalties, as no one can maintain a conflicting loyalty or belief system forever.

The first two sentences set the scene and give some hypothetical examples and stakes for the reader to care about.

The third sentence finishes off the intro with the thesis statement, making very clear how the author stands on the issue ("people have to make a choice between competing loyalties, as no one can maintain a conflicting loyalty or belief system forever." )

Paragraphs 2 and 3

Psychological theory states that human beings are not equipped to maintain conflicting loyalties indefinitely and that attempting to do so leads to a state called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance theory is the psychological idea that people undergo tremendous mental stress or anxiety when holding contradictory beliefs, values, or loyalties (Festinger, 1957). Even if human beings initially hold a conflicting loyalty, they will do their best to find a mental equilibrium by making a choice between those loyalties—stay stalwart to a belief system or change their beliefs. One of the earliest formal examples of cognitive dissonance theory comes from Leon Festinger's When Prophesy Fails . Members of an apocalyptic cult are told that the end of the world will occur on a specific date and that they alone will be spared the Earth's destruction. When that day comes and goes with no apocalypse, the cult members face a cognitive dissonance between what they see and what they've been led to believe (Festinger, 1956). Some choose to believe that the cult's beliefs are still correct, but that the Earth was simply spared from destruction by mercy, while others choose to believe that they were lied to and that the cult was fraudulent all along. Both beliefs cannot be correct at the same time, and so the cult members are forced to make their choice.

But even when conflicting loyalties can lead to potentially physical, rather than just mental, consequences, people will always make a choice to fall on one side or other of a dividing line. Take, for instance, Nicolaus Copernicus, a man born and raised in Catholic Poland (and educated in Catholic Italy). Though the Catholic church dictated specific scientific teachings, Copernicus' loyalty to his own observations and scientific evidence won out over his loyalty to his country's government and belief system. When he published his heliocentric model of the solar system--in opposition to the geocentric model that had been widely accepted for hundreds of years (Hannam, 2011)-- Copernicus was making a choice between his loyalties. In an attempt t o maintain his fealty both to the established system and to what he believed, h e sat on his findings for a number of years (Fantoli, 1994). But, ultimately, Copernicus made the choice to side with his beliefs and observations above all and published his work for the world to see (even though, in doing so, he risked both his reputation and personal freedoms).

These two paragraphs provide the reasons why the author supports the main argument and uses substantiated sources to back those reasons.

The paragraph on cognitive dissonance theory gives both broad supporting evidence and more narrow, detailed supporting evidence to show why the thesis statement is correct not just anecdotally but also scientifically and psychologically. First, we see why people in general have a difficult time accepting conflicting loyalties and desires and then how this applies to individuals through the example of the cult members from the Dr. Festinger's research.

The next paragraph continues to use more detailed examples from history to provide further evidence of why the thesis that people cannot indefinitely maintain conflicting loyalties is true.

Paragraph 4

Some will claim that it is possible to maintain conflicting beliefs or loyalties permanently, but this is often more a matter of people deluding themselves and still making a choice for one side or the other, rather than truly maintaining loyalty to both sides equally. For example, Lancelot du Lac typifies a person who claims to maintain a balanced loyalty between to two parties, but his attempt to do so fails (as all attempts to permanently maintain conflicting loyalties must). Lancelot tells himself and others that he is equally devoted to both King Arthur and his court and to being Queen Guinevere's knight (Malory, 2008). But he can neither be in two places at once to protect both the king and queen, nor can he help but let his romantic feelings for the queen to interfere with his duties to the king and the kingdom. Ultimately, he and Queen Guinevere give into their feelings for one another and Lancelot—though he denies it—chooses his loyalty to her over his loyalty to Arthur. This decision plunges the kingdom into a civil war, ages Lancelot prematurely, and ultimately leads to Camelot's ruin (Raabe, 1987). Though Lancelot claimed to have been loyal to both the king and the queen, this loyalty was ultimately in conflict, and he could not maintain it.

Here we have the acknowledgement of a potential counter-argument and the evidence as to why it isn't true.

The argument is that some people (or literary characters) have asserted that they give equal weight to their conflicting loyalties. The refutation is that, though some may claim to be able to maintain conflicting loyalties, they're either lying to others or deceiving themselves. The paragraph shows why this is true by providing an example of this in action.

Paragraph 5

Whether it be through literature or history, time and time again, people demonstrate the challenges of trying to manage conflicting loyalties and the inevitable consequences of doing so. Though belief systems are malleable and will often change over time, it is not possible to maintain two mutually exclusive loyalties or beliefs at once. In the end, people always make a choice, and loyalty for one party or one side of an issue will always trump loyalty to the other.

The concluding paragraph summarizes the essay, touches on the evidence presented, and re-states the thesis statement.

How to Write an Argumentative Essay: 8 Steps

Writing the best argumentative essay is all about the preparation, so let's talk steps:

#1: Preliminary Research

If you have the option to pick your own argumentative essay topic (which you most likely will), then choose one or two topics you find the most intriguing or that you have a vested interest in and do some preliminary research on both sides of the debate.

Do an open internet search just to see what the general chatter is on the topic and what the research trends are.

Did your preliminary reading influence you to pick a side or change your side? Without diving into all the scholarly articles at length, do you believe there's enough evidence to support your claim? Have there been scientific studies? Experiments? Does a noted scholar in the field agree with you? If not, you may need to pick another topic or side of the argument to support.

#2: Pick Your Side and Form Your Thesis

Now's the time to pick the side of the argument you feel you can support the best and summarize your main point into your thesis statement.

Your thesis will be the basis of your entire essay, so make sure you know which side you're on, that you've stated it clearly, and that you stick by your argument throughout the entire essay .

#3: Heavy-Duty Research Time

You've taken a gander at what the internet at large has to say on your argument, but now's the time to actually read those sources and take notes.

Check scholarly journals online at Google Scholar , the Directory of Open Access Journals , or JStor . You can also search individual university or school libraries and websites to see what kinds of academic articles you can access for free. Keep track of your important quotes and page numbers and put them somewhere that's easy to find later.

And don't forget to check your school or local libraries as well!

#4: Outline

Follow the five-paragraph outline structure from the previous section.

Fill in your topic, your reasons, and your supporting evidence into each of the categories.

Before you begin to flesh out the essay, take a look at what you've got. Is your thesis statement in the first paragraph? Is it clear? Is your argument logical? Does your supporting evidence support your reasoning?

By outlining your essay, you streamline your process and take care of any logic gaps before you dive headfirst into the writing. This will save you a lot of grief later on if you need to change your sources or your structure, so don't get too trigger-happy and skip this step.

Now that you've laid out exactly what you'll need for your essay and where, it's time to fill in all the gaps by writing it out.

Take it one step at a time and expand your ideas into complete sentences and substantiated claims. It may feel daunting to turn an outline into a complete draft, but just remember that you've already laid out all the groundwork; now you're just filling in the gaps.

If you have the time before deadline, give yourself a day or two (or even just an hour!) away from your essay . Looking it over with fresh eyes will allow you to see errors, both minor and major, that you likely would have missed had you tried to edit when it was still raw.

Take a first pass over the entire essay and try your best to ignore any minor spelling or grammar mistakes—you're just looking at the big picture right now. Does it make sense as a whole? Did the essay succeed in making an argument and backing that argument up logically? (Do you feel persuaded?)

If not, go back and make notes so that you can fix it for your final draft.

Once you've made your revisions to the overall structure, mark all your small errors and grammar problems so you can fix them in the next draft.

#7: Final Draft

Use the notes you made on the rough draft and go in and hack and smooth away until you're satisfied with the final result.

A checklist for your final draft:

• Formatting is correct according to your teacher's standards
• No errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Essay is the right length and size for the assignment
• The argument is present, consistent, and concise
• Each reason is supported by relevant evidence
• The essay makes sense overall

#8: Celebrate!

Once you've brought that final draft to a perfect polish and turned in your assignment, you're done! Go you!

Be prepared and ♪ you'll never go hungry again ♪, *cough*, or struggle with your argumentative essay-writing again. (Walt Disney Studios)

Good Examples of Argumentative Essays Online

Theory is all well and good, but examples are key. Just to get you started on what a fully-fleshed out argumentative essay looks like, let's see some examples in action.

Check out these two argumentative essay examples on the use of landmines and freons (and note the excellent use of concrete sources to back up their arguments!).

The Use of Landmines

A Shattered Sky

The Take-Aways: Keys to Writing an Argumentative Essay

At first, writing an argumentative essay may seem like a monstrous hurdle to overcome, but with the proper preparation and understanding, you'll be able to knock yours out of the park.

Remember the differences between a persuasive essay and an argumentative one, make sure your thesis is clear, and double-check that your supporting evidence is both relevant to your point and well-sourced . Pick your topic, do your research, make your outline, and fill in the gaps. Before you know it, you'll have yourself an A+ argumentative essay there, my friend.

What's Next?

Now you know the ins and outs of an argumentative essay, but how comfortable are you writing in other styles? Learn more about the four writing styles and when it makes sense to use each .

Understand how to make an argument, but still having trouble organizing your thoughts? Check out our guide to three popular essay formats and choose which one is right for you.

Ready to make your case, but not sure what to write about? We've created a list of 50 potential argumentative essay topics to spark your imagination.

Courtney scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT in high school and went on to graduate from Stanford University with a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She is passionate about bringing education and the tools to succeed to students from all backgrounds and walks of life, as she believes open education is one of the great societal equalizers. She has years of tutoring experience and writes creative works in her free time.

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Child Marriage Essay

500 words child marriage essay.

Child Marriage continues to be a prevalent practice in many parts of the world . Even though the world is evolving at a fast pace, there are some regions that can’t seem to move on with times. What’s sad is the dark reality of child marriage which is not considered often. Child marriage is basically the formal or informal marriage of a child with or without their consent, under the age of 18. In most cases, the boy or man is older than the girl. Through a child marriage essay, we will throw light on this social issue.

Causes and Impact of Child Marriage

Child marriage is no less than exploitation of right. In almost all places, the child must be 18 years and above to get married. Thus, marrying off the child before the age is exploiting their right.

One of the most common causes of child marriage is the tradition which has been in practice for a long time. In many places, ever since a girl is born, they consider her to be someone else’s property.

Similarly, the elders wish to work out their family’s expansion so they marry off the youngsters to characterize their status. Most importantly, poor people practice child marriage to get rid of their loans, taxes, dowry and more.

The impact of child marriage can be life-changing for children, especially girls. The household responsibilities fall on the children. They are not mentally or physically ready for it, yet it falls on them.

While people expect the minor boys to bear the financial responsibilities, the girls are expected to look after the house and family. Their freedom to learn and play is taken away.

Further, their health is also put at risk due to the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV and more. Especially the girls who get pregnant at a young age, it becomes harmful for the mother as well as the baby.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to End Child Marriage

Ending child marriage is the need of the hour. In order to end this social evil, everyone from individuals to world leaders must challenge the traditional norms. Moreover, we must do away with ideas that reinforce that girls are inferior to boys.

We must empower the children, especially girls, to become their own agents of change. To achieve this, they must get access to quality education and allow them to complete their studies so they can lead an independent life later on.

Safe spaces are important for children to be able to express themselves and make their voices heard. Thus, it is essential to remove all forms of gender discrimination to ensure everyone is given equal value and protection.

Conclusion of Child Marriage Essay

To sum it up, a marriage must be a sacred union between mature individuals and not an illogical institution which compromises with the future of our children. The problem must be solved at the grassroots level beginning with ending poverty and lack of education. This way, people will learn better and do better.

FAQ on Child Marriage Essay

Question 1: What are the causes of child marriage?

Answer 1: The causes of child marriages include poverty, dowry, cultural traditions, religious and social pressures, illiteracy, and supposed incapability of women to work for money.

Question 2: How can we end child marriage?

Answer 2: To end child marriage we must also raise awareness about this issue and educate both parents and kids. Further, we must encourage them to be independent first and then search for a partner only after attaining a specific age. Laws should be introduced to tackle this social issue.

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