Downward educational mobility and the life satisfaction of adolescents and parents

• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Matthias Pollmann‐Schult
• Date: 01 February 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12666

RESEARCH

Downward educational mobility and the life

satisfaction of adolescents and parents

Matthias Pollmann-Schult

University of Siegen, Faculty of Arts and

Humanities, Siegen, Germany

Correspondence

Matthias Pollmann-Schult, University of

Siegen, Faculty of Arts and Humanities,

Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2, 57076 Siegen,

Germany.

Email: matthias.pollmann@uni-siegen.de

Abstract

Objective: This study examines whether parental and ado-

lescent life satisfaction is lower when adolescents are on a

lower educational trajectory than their parents, and

whether this association is mediated by the quality of the

parent–adolescent relationship.

Background: Existing literature shows that families seek to

ensure status maintenance and to avoid downward educa-

tional mobility in their children. Little is known, however,

about whether downward educational mobility has nega-

tive consequences for adolescents’and their parents’well-

being.

Method: Using data on 3781 16-year-old adolescents and

their parents from the German Socio-Economic Panel

(SOEP), this study examined associations between down-

ward educational mobility, parent–adolescent relationship

quality, and the life satisfaction of adolescents and their

parents.

Results: In families with two college-educated parents,

risks of downward educational mobility were associated

with increased parent–child conflicts and quarrels over

school issues as well as with lower life satisfaction in par-

ents and adolescents.

Conclusion: Adolescents and parents report reduced levels

of life satisfaction when adolescents are on a lower educa-

tional trajectory than their parents, probably because the

risk of declining status across generations negatively

affects the psychological well-being of parents and

adolescents.

Implications: Providers of family services should consider

that the psychological effects of low educational achieve-

ment in adolescents vary depending on parental levels of

education.

Received: 24 February 2021Revised: 8 December 2021Accepted: 11 December 2021

DOI: 10.1111/fare.12666

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2022 The Author. Family Relations published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Council on Family Relations.

234 Family Relations. 2023;72:234–252.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/fare

KEYWORDS

adolescents, educational mobility, life satisfaction, parent–child conflict

Over recent decades, a growing body of research has addressed the subjective well-being of chil-

dren (e.g., Ben-Arieh et al., 2014; Proctor et al., 2009) and parents (e.g., Nomaguchi &

Milkie, 2020; Simon & Caputo, 2019). These studies show a substantial influence of family fac-

tors, such as parenting behavior, family activities, and the quality of the parent–child relation-

ship, on the subjective well-being of families. Relatively few studies to date, however, have

examined how children’s school achievement affects family well-being, although school shapes

daily life for children and parents.

Possible reasons why children’s school achievement might influence family processes and

well-being relate to the importance of education in life outcomes. School successes and failures

predict later labor market outcomes, which in turn affect health (e.g., Dudal et al., 2018;

Zajacova & Lawrence, 2018), income, and social status (e.g., Powdthavee et al., 2015).

Parents—who are generally well aware of these facts—want their children to achieve high edu-

cational outcomes (Child Trends DataBank, 2015). As a result, children’s educational achieve-

ment constitutes an important factor in families’overall well-being, and parents experience

lower life satisfaction when their children perform poorly in school (Chen et al., 2021; Tong

et al., 2021). Low school achievement also affects the adolescents themselves, who are more

often depressed (Herman et al., 2008; Huang, 2015) and less satisfied (Ng et al., 2015; Tobia

et al., 2019) than adolescents who perform well in school.

In this study, I show that associations between adolescents’school achievement and the life

satisfaction of adolescents and parents strongly depend on parental levels of education. More

precisely, I assume that life satisfaction decreases in both parents and adolescents when adoles-

cents face the risk of downward educational mobility, which occurs when children have lower

educational attainment than their parents. This assumption is informed by theories of class-

based inequalities in education (e.g., Boudon, 1974; Breen & Goldthorpe, 1997), which postu-

late that parents as well as children want to ensure status maintenance and avoid downward

educational mobility. To achieve status maintenance, it is essential that children reach at least

the same educational level as their parents. Such class-specific expectations and aspirations are

well documented: Higher educated parents have higher educational expectations for their chil-

dren than lower educated parents (e.g., Spera et al., 2009). Likewise, adolescents with college-

educated parents are significantly more likely to hold college aspirations than adolescents with

non–college-educated parents, net of adolescents’school performance (Berrington et al., 2016;

Gil-Flores et al., 2011; Wu & Bai, 2015).

Despite extensive knowledge about families’ambitions to ensure status maintenance, there

has been little empirical research on how parents’and children’s well-being is affected if chil-

dren fail to match their parents’level of education. In the present study, I aimed to fill this gap

by examining whether parental and adolescent life satisfaction is lower when adolescents are at

risk of downward educational mobility, and whether this association is mediated by the quality

of the parent–adolescent relationship.

The study addresses three interrelated questions: Is the parent–adolescent relationship more

strained if adolescents are at risk of downward educational mobility? Is the risk of downward

educational mobility associated with lower life satisfaction in parents and adolescents? And

finally, are decreases in life satisfaction in downwardly mobile adolescents and their parents

mediated by a poorer quality of the parent–adolescent relationship? This study is innovative in

three respects. First, in contrast to previous studies focusing on absolute levels of school

achievement, this study examined how adolescents’school achievement relative to their parents’

education relates to life satisfaction. Second, this study was not restricted to adolescents’

EDUCATIONAL MOBILITY AND FAMILY LIFE SATISFACTION235