This study examines the additive effect of attitudes towards gender roles and importance of marriage on the centrality of children in seven East European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, the former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia using the data from the 1994 International Social Science Survey (ISSP). Results support country related differences in participants' attitudes about gender roles, marriage and children. The results show former East Germany as being the most egalitarian country, Bulgaria and Hungary as the most traditional ones, and Poland, Slovenia, Russia and Czech Republic in between. A model of the dynamics among attitudes towards gender roles, importance of marriage and the centrality of children was tested for the goodness-of-fit using structural equation models (AMOS 4.0) techniques by the method of maximum likelihood. The goodness-of-fit provided evidence that the hypothesised model was stable. The results indicated that attitudes towards gender roles and marriage have a strong impact on attitudes toward children.