The increase in divorce rates over the past decades challenges the traditional image of the two-parent family. Yet, this traditional view of the family remains most often central to political socialization research. Therefore, this study investigates how parental separation affects the political socialization process, by comparing adults who did and did not experience parental separation while living at home. I firstly expect that parental separation yields more left-wing ideologies and more favourable attitudes towards redistribution, because of the economic deprivation that is often caused by parental separation. Secondly, I expect more liberal attitudes towards sexual and family ethics among adult children of whom the parents have separated during their childhood, because of the experience of parents breaking with traditional family norms. As a first step, pan-European multilevel analyses are performed using the European Values Study to investigate to what extent the political preferences and attitudes towards sexual and family ethics of adult children with divorced parents differ, from those without separated parents. Secondly, household data from Germany (G-SOEP) is used, that allows to control for parental preferences, and to estimate sibling fixed effect models in which the effect of divorce on political attitudes is investigated, by comparing siblings from the same family with differential experiences regarding their parental separation.