Does Educational Similarity Drive Parental Support?
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| Author | Pearl A. Dykstra,Renske Keizer,Brett Ory |
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12413 |
B O Erasmus University Rotterdam
R K Erasmus University Rotterdam and University of Amsterdam∗
P A. D Erasmus University Rotterdam∗∗
Does Educational Similarity Drive Parental Support?
This article tests competing mechanisms
explaining linkages between parent–child
educational similarity and parental advice
and interest to adult children, asking whether
mechanisms differ for mothers and fathers.
Educational similarities might provide com-
mon ground whereas educational dissimilarity
affects parents’ authority to dispense advice.
Using ordered logistic regression with data
from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study
(N=2,444) parental advice and interest are
modeled separately for mothers and fathers.
Seemingly unrelated estimation is used to
test for gender differences across models,
revealing that mechanisms driving parental
support differ by parents’ gender. Fathers
show more interest in adult children when they
are educationally similar (consistent with the
homophily hypothesis), but only among the
highly educated, whereas mothers show more
interest to highly educated children, regardless
of their own level of educational attainment.
Fathers’ advice is conditioned on their own
Department of Public Administration and Sociology,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Postbus 1738, 3000DR
Rotterdam, the Netherlands (ory@fsw.eur.nl).
∗Department of Public Administration and Sociology,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Postbus 1738, 3000DR
Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Research Institute of Child
Development and Education, University of Amsterdam,
Postbus15776, 1001NG Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
∗∗Department of Public Administration and Sociology,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Postbus 1738, 3000DR
Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Key Words: education, family relations, gender roles, inter-
generational relationships, parent–child relationships,par-
ent involvement.
educational attainment whereas mothers give
advice unconditionally (consistent with the
gender hypothesis).
When children are young, receiving more advice
and interest from parents is linked to children’s
improved well-being and school performance
(Fan & Williams, 2010; Wang & Eccles, 2012).
When children are adults, receiving parental
support in the form of advice and interest helps
offspring to dene life goals, helps overcome
difcult life events, and improves life satisfac-
tion (Fingerman, Cheng, Wesselmann, et al.,
2012; Ratelle, Simard, & Guay, 2013). Not only
is emotional support by parents important to
their children’s well-being but also it remains
common throughout children’s life courses.
Even after children reach adulthood, parents are
generally constants in their children’s support
networks (Albertini, Kohli, & Vogel, 2007).
Moreover, as a result of health care improve-
ments and long life expectancy, mothers and
fathers now spend more time being parents of
adult children than they are of minors. Given
the importance and frequency of parental advice
and interest for adult children and the increasing
amount of time that parents and adult children
spend as fellow life travelers (Hagestad, 1986),
this article aims to provide a better understand-
ing of the driving forces behind parental advice
and interest in adulthood.
In investigating the driving forces underlying
parental advice and interest, we posit that dif-
ferent mechanisms may be relevant for mothers
and fathers. Studies have shown that the factors
inuencing involvement with young children
differ by gender of the parent. Structural factors
Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (August 2017): 947–964 947
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12413
948 Journal of Marriage and Family
such as men’s and their partner’s work hours
tend to guide father involvement, whereas nor-
mative factors such as gender ideology or moth-
erhood ideology tend to guide mother involve-
ment (for a review, see Palkovitz, Trask, &
Adamsons, 2014). Even when children reach
adulthood, mothers and fathers continue to par-
ent differently; most notably, mothers give con-
siderably more emotional support than do fathers
(Kahn, McGill, & Bianchi, 2011). In light of
these ndings, we investigate whether mech-
anisms differ for mothers and fathers, focus-
ing in particular on the role of educational
similarity.
T I E
Educational attainment plays an important
theoretical role in prior research because it is
thought to shape status and resources as well as
norms and values. More highly educated parents
of school-aged children generally spend more
time in cultural capital building activities than
parents with lower levels of education, both
because they can afford to and because they feel
these activities are important to their children’s
development (Altintas, 2016; Kalil, Ryan, &
Corey, 2012; McLanahan, 2004). Furthermore,
studies of fathers of young children consistently
show educational attainment to be a reliable
predictor of both the quantity and quality of
father involvement, with more highly educated
fathers spending more time with their children
in activities that further child development
(Gauthier, Smeeding, & Furstenberg, 2004).
Highly educated parents give more to adult chil-
dren (Davey, Janke, & Savla, 2004; Fingerman
et al., 2015), and highly educated adult children
receive more emotional support (Lawton, Sil-
verstein, & Bengtson, 1994; Pillemer & Suitor,
2002) when compared with less well-educated
parents and children.
Although educational attainment as such
may be a strong predictor of parental support
and advice, we believe that focusing only on
the educational attainment of the “sending”
or “receiving” party will not be sufcient for
understanding why some children receive more
support and advice than others. Prior research on
parental support of adult children identied sev-
eral characteristics of intergenerational dyads
that drive support, including residential propin-
quity, relationship quality, and past support
(Davey et al., 2004). The lack of attention to
educational similarity is conspicuous given that
educational attainment itself has repeatedly been
shown to affect parental advice and interest and
that other dyad characteristics such as gender
similarity and value similarity have been linked
to closeness in intergenerational relationships
(Pillemer & Suitor, 2002).
Thus, we build on prior literature by
considering the way in which educational
similarities between parents and children are
associated with parental support. Do parents
give more advice and interest to “apples who
fall close to the tree” or to adult children who
differ more strongly from their parents, and are
there differences between mothers and fathers?
In other words, is the difference in educational
attainment in parent–adult child pairs linked to
receipt of parental advice and interest by adult
children and, if so, how do the mechanisms vary
for mothers and fathers?
E S D
Totest the relationship between educational sim-
ilarity and parental advice and interest, we con-
sider the following four types of parent–child
dyads: dyads where both parent and child have a
low level of education (low–low),the parent has
a high level of education and the child a lowlevel
(parent high–child low or downwardly mobile
children); the parent has a low level of educa-
tion and the child a high level (parent low–child
high or upwardly mobile children), and both par-
ent and child have a high level of education
(high–high). These four types of dyads not only
provide a parsimonious description of the educa-
tional similarities and differences between par-
ents and children but also distinguish between
cases where both the parents and children are
highly educated from those where both have low
educational attainment.
By studying the relationship between educa-
tional similarity and intergenerational solidarity,
we consider Parsons’ (1951) idea that social
mobility and intergenerational solidarity are
antithetical. According to Parsons, whereas
social mobility implies that individuals can
attain a different status than that ascribed to them
at birth, intergenerational solidarity implies that
statuses ascribed to one member are inferred to
all family members. Thus, an increase in social
mobility would be accompanied by a decrease in
intergenerational solidarity. At the time, empiri-
cal research that tested this theory mostly failed
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