A developmental process analysis of cross-generational continuity in educational attainment.(Report)

This study is concerned with cross-generational links in level of educational attainment. Educational milestones such as completing high school, attending college, and graduating from college bear a strong relation to occupational status and economic well-being. Compared to their better-educated peers, poorly educated individuals experience more stress and adversity in their personal lives; find family life, including parenting, to be more challenging; and generally have difficulty making the transition to adult roles and responsibilities (Luster & Okagaki, 2005). Their children, in turn, show more adjustment problems, do more poorly in school, and are themselves less likely to complete formal schooling (e.g., Davis-Kean, 2005; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997). The sequelae of low educational attainment are thus well known, but the developmental processes through which such outcomes accrue as a consequence or by-product of education level are not well understood. A key to such understanding may lie in the identification of individual, family, and sociocultural factors that account for these predictive links and the conditions and contexts in which continuities in educational attainment may be weaker or stronger.

Educational attainment measures essentially represent a social address, a broad and encompassing set of experiences and characteristics that are subsumed--much like socioeconomic status (SES)-under a rubric that sheds little light on patterns of adaptation across developmental contexts and across generations. In our effort to understand cross-generational continuity and discontinuity in educational attainment, we draw from two developmental perspectives. The first perspective is that parents' low educational attainment level, whether as a lead indicator of underlying adaptational deficits or as a socialization constraint, sets into motion a dynamic cascade of events and experiences that cumulate in their children's own low educational attainment level. Parents' education level, from this perspective, is a distal factor that is only indirectly related to children's subsequent education level. More proximal factors, including the quality of early parenting, children's behavior and performance in school, and parents' involvement in their children's academics and awareness of their activities and whereabouts, may serve as mechanisms through which educational attainment level is transferred across generations. These factors may themselves have both direct and mediated (through subsequent experiences) relations with youths' attainment level. We previously have documented this kind of cumulative developmental progression in the domains of substance abuse (Dodge et al., 2006) and romantic relationship violence (Pettit et al., 2006). To our knowledge, there has been no previous study testing this kind of developmental model, in an intergenerational context, for educational attainment.

Our framework for understanding the developmental processes linking mothers' and youths' educational attainment is informed by social-interactional theory. This seminal theory, originally conceived to account for the development of antisocial behavior across childhood and adolescence (e.g., Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992), has been applied more recently to the study of other developmental products, including the failure to graduate from secondary school (Veronneau, Vitaro, Pedersen, & Tremblay, 2008). From this theoretical perspective, inept parenting is thought to foster the development of antisocial behavior through a failure to provide negative consequences for misbehavior and by providing a model of manipulation and power assertion. The child fails to acquire skills needed for relating to peers in constructive ways, and deviant peers assume a more prominent role in the child's socialization. Poor relationships with teachers, lack of support for academic accomplishment, and a general aversion to school undermines academic achievements. The parent-child relationship continues to deteriorate, and parents withdraw (rather than confront) and fail to provide needed support and supervision. One end product in this chain of events is academic failure and a lack of interest in, or capacity for, educational attainments.

The parenting and school-adjustment factors outlined in the social-interactional model are not the only relevant social-developmental experiences to have importance for educational attainment. Parents' beliefs about education, the kinds of educative experiences they provide for their children, and children's efficacy beliefs and commitment to education, among other factors, also clearly play important roles (Davis-Kean, 2005). But low parental education has been found to be associated with the kinds of parenting and school adjustment factors described earlier, and they likely represent at least one set of pathways through which cross-generational continuities in educational attainment operate.

The second developmental perspective informing the goals of this study is that of lawful discontinuity in the intergenerational transfer of low educational attainment. Children whose parents fail to complete normative educational milestones are at risk for a variety of negative social-behavioral outcomes, as was noted earlier. But as is the case in children's exposure to other kinds of developmental risk factors, low parental educational attainment does not foreordain lack of educational accomplishment and school completion in late adolescence and early adulthood. The identification of factors that may decouple parents' educational attainment from their children's educational attainment could be important as a means of targeting preventive interventions for at-risk youths. Previous research on protective mechanisms (e.g., Criss, Pettit, Bates, Dodge, & Lapp, 2002) provides useful guidance in the selection of relevant constructs, which may be construed along a proximal-to-distal continuum. At the most proximal level are personal attributes of the individual, such as interpersonal competence and academic performance. These attributes may be rooted in early dispositions and proclivities and may be shaped by socialization experiences provided by parents. They also may stem in part from the educational milieu within which a school-aged child finds himself or herself. At a less proximal level is the kind of parenting that a child receives, with parenting quality in early childhood establishing the footing for preschool-to-school transitions (i.e., through proactive teaching and lack of punitiveness) and parenting quality in early adolescence reflecting adequate supervision and engagement with the child in matters of academic performance and constructive use of discretionary time. At the most distal level are social-context factors that may amplify or dampen the relative risk associated with low levels of parent education. Family structure and ethnicity comprise one such set of background characteristics. Because the presence of one (or more) risk factors has been shown to interact with other risk factors in a synergistic fashion (Dodge & Pettit, 2003), these child, family, and school characteristics were expected to increase the likelihood that low educational attainment levels would be transferred across generations.

Correlates and Predictors of Educational Attainment in Developmental Perspective

Contextual and family-process models of developmental pathways converge to suggest that (a) parental educational attainment is embedded in a broader matrix of family-ecological factors that co-occur with, but do not fully account for, the predictive link between educational attainment and subsequent child outcomes, and (b) these predictive associations between distal social-address markers and later outcomes likely operate through intervening experiences with parents, peers, and schools. This perspective is one of developmental mediation (Dodge & Pettit, 2003), whereby the effects of contextual experiences in early life are played out through successive experiences with major social agents in later life. In the context of parents' educational attainment and in line with the social-interactional perspective, this would be expected to be seen in parents' socializing behaviors and in children's behavior and performance in the early school years. The links between parents' education attainment and their children's school achievement (Davis-Kean, 2005; Havemen & Wolfe, 1995; Smith, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1997) and their children's behavioral problems (Dearing, McCartney, & Taylor, 2001; Nagin & Tremblay, 2001) have been well established in the literature. Research on parenting has also shown that mothers' education attainment is associated with the quality of the home environment (Corwvyn & Bradley, 2002; Davis-Kean, 2005; Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, & Duncan, 1994; Smith, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1997). Other evidence in the literature suggests that highly educated mothers are more actively involved in and more knowledgeable about their adolescents' academic lives (Baker & Stevenson, 1986; Yonezawa, 2000).