Having children reverses the drop in authoritarianism caused by university education

Evidence

What do we expect here? Since these folks went to school a lot, their RWA scores should have been at least 10% lower than they were as freshmen. And overall, their authoritarianism had dropped over the intervening twelve years, but only about 5%. Maybe their teachers in the mid-1970s were not so hot. Or could their authoritarianism have gone down “a lot” at university but then rebounded. What could have caused this? … The participants without children—nearly half the sample—had RWA scores 9% lower than they had had at age 18. The ones with kids (who had had the same levels of authoritarianism as introductory psychology students as those who remained childless, and just as much education) were virtually back where they had started. They had “fully recovered” from the beneficial effects of their university experience. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1115