Parental warmth—not poverty or danger—predicts positive world beliefs in adulthood

A new international study has found that parental warmth during childhood and adolescence predicts young adults’ beliefs that the world is good, safe, and enticing. Surprisingly, other childhood experiences—including harsh parenting, low socioeconomic status, and neighborhood danger—showed little connection to these so-called “primal world beliefs.” The findings were published in the journal Child Development.

Primal world beliefs, or “primals,” refer to people’s core assumptions about the general nature of the world. These beliefs—such as whether the world is safe, abundant, or progressing—are thought to influence mental health, behavior, and well-being. Previous studies have shown that primals are stable over time and closely tied to life satisfaction and psychological adjustment. However, researchers have struggled to pinpoint what experiences shape these beliefs, especially during childhood.

The new study aimed to investigate whether early-life experiences—including economic hardship, dangerous neighborhoods, and various parenting practices—predict primal world beliefs in early adulthood. The researchers were particularly interested in testing widely held assumptions: that people who grow up poor or in unsafe environments will see the world as barren or dangerous, and that childhood adversity broadly shapes a pessimistic view of the world.

“Adults’ beliefs about the world are importantly related to their mental health, but we know little about how these beliefs develop. Our goal was to better understand how adults come to hold these beliefs that are so critical to their functioning in the world,” said study author Jennifer E. Lansford, the S. Malcolm Gillis Distinguished Research Professor of Public Policy and director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University and co-author of Child and Adolescent Development in Cultural Context.

The research team analyzed data from a large longitudinal study called Parenting Across Cultures, which followed children and their families in eight countries over the span of 14 years. These countries—Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States—were selected for their diversity in religion, income, cultural values, and social conditions.

The sample included 1,215 participants (50% girls) who were initially assessed at around age 8 and then followed through age 22. At multiple points during childhood and adolescence, parents and children reported on a variety of experiences, including neighborhood safety, family income, and parenting practices such as warmth, harsh discipline, psychological control, and autonomy granting. At age 22, the original child participants completed a questionnaire measuring their primal world beliefs.

Five key primal beliefs were assessed: whether the world is Good, Safe, Enticing, Abundant, and Progressing. These were selected based on previous theoretical work that organized primals into overarching (e.g., Good), secondary (e.g., Safe and Enticing), and tertiary (e.g., Abundant and Progressing) levels. The researchers then tested whether earlier experiences predicted these beliefs in early adulthood.

The results revealed a striking pattern: among the many childhood factors studied, parental warmth stood out as the only significant predictor of several positive primal beliefs. Specifically, children who experienced more warmth from their parents—defined by expressions of affection, acceptance, and support—were more likely to believe as young adults that the world is Good, Safe, and Enticing.

“We found that parental warmth, which involves parents making their children feel loved and accepted, was related years later to young adults’ belief that the world is safe (rather than dangerous) and enticing (filled with beautiful and wonderful things, rather than dull),” Lansford told PsyPost. “The results speak to the importance of parental warmth, love, and acceptance. This is a hopeful message for parents because fostering warm and loving relationships with their children is something most parents can do that has the potential to pay important dividends for children’s future development.”

These associations remained significant after accounting for other factors, such as gender and culture. In contrast, neighborhood danger, socioeconomic status, harsh parenting, psychological control, and parental autonomy granting had little to no predictive value for primals in early adulthood. Even a decline in family income over time was unrelated to beliefs about whether the world is progressing.

“We were surprised that some experiences in childhood were not directly predictive of young adults’ beliefs about the world,” Lansford said. “For example, children who grew up in more dangerous neighborhoods did not necessarily grow up to believe that the world is dangerous.”

One additional finding was a gender difference: women were slightly less likely than men to hold the belief that the world is abundant, though this was not a focus of the study.

The researchers emphasized that their results challenge popular assumptions about how life experiences shape one’s worldview. Although many people—including developmental scientists—believe that hardship or privilege directly informs whether people see the world as dangerous or abundant, this study found little evidence for such a connection.

Instead, the findings suggest that primals are not simple reflections of material conditions. The researchers argue that primals may function more like stable mental frameworks—akin to schemas or implicit beliefs—that help people interpret their experiences. This could mean that when people encounter events that contradict their existing primals, they tend to interpret or even ignore them in ways that preserve their prior beliefs.

This has implications for both well-being and behavior. People who see the world as safe or enticing may benefit from more openness and optimism, though this could also lead them to underestimate real dangers. The researchers note that many parents, especially those in high-risk environments, may intentionally instill a belief that the world is dangerous in an effort to keep their children safe. However, this belief is linked to worse mental health outcomes, including depression and lower life satisfaction.

The study has several strengths. It used a prospective longitudinal design, measuring experiences during childhood as they happened and assessing outcomes over a decade later. It also included a diverse international sample, allowing the researchers to examine both within-culture and between-culture patterns. Most of the variation in primals was found within countries, not between them, highlighting the importance of individual experiences over national or cultural averages.

However, there were also limitations. The sample was not nationally representative, so the findings may not apply to all populations. In addition, while the study measured parenting and environmental factors beginning at age 8, it is possible that some primal beliefs were already forming before this age. And as with all observational studies, causality cannot be established.

“Another limitation is that primals were self-reported by young adults (as they would have to be to assess individuals’ beliefs about the world), and some of the predictors also were self-reported,” Lansford noted. “Thus, it is possible that if children already believed that the world is Safe, for example, the primal could have affected their reports of neighborhood danger or parental warmth. The data are correlational so causal relations cannot be asserted, and the question of where and when developmentally the primal came from in the first place remains open.”

“An important future direction will be to study primal world beliefs during childhood and adolescence rather than adulthood. Right now, we have a much better understanding of adults’ beliefs about the world than children’s and adolescents’ beliefs about the world. Children and adolescents may describe the world differently from adults, and even if both children and adults describe the world as Good, their conceptualizations of what makes the world good are likely to differ.”

The study, “Predictors of Young Adults’ Primal World Beliefs in Eight Countries,” was authored by Jennifer E. Lansford, Laura Gorla, W. Andrew Rothenberg, Marc H. Bornstein, Lei Chang, Jeremy D. W. Clifton, Kirby Deater-Deckard, Laura Di Giunta, Kenneth A. Dodge, Sevtap Gurdal, Daranee Junla, Paul Oburu, Concetta Pastorelli, Ann T. Skinner, Emma Sorbring, Laurence Steinberg, Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado, Saengduean Yotanyamaneewong, Liane Peña Alampay, Suha M. Al-Hassan, and Dario Bacchini.