This study examined the relationship between college students' perceptions of their parents' attitudes toward them during childhood and adolescence and the subjects' own child rearing attitudes. A total of 188 undergraduates enrolled in an introductory psychology course participated in the study. Forty-two males and 46 females were themselves parents and 50 males and 50 females were not parents. Each subject filled out the Family Relations Inventory (FRI) which measured subjects' perceptions of their parents' attitudes toward them and the Maryland Parent Attitude Survey (MPAS) which measured the subjects' own attitudes toward child rearing. Findings indicated that the parent of the opposite sex is more directly influential in the development of an offspring's later child rearing attitudes than the parent of the same sex, but that overall, parents' child rearing attitudes do not account in any clearcut, linear fashion for a very large proportion of the variance in their offsprings' later child rearing attitudes. (JMB)