Parental Warmth and Children’s Postsecondary Education: College Completion in Two Twentieth-Century Birth Cohorts (1921-1970)

• In Event: 546 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. Parental Involvement and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

Parents are significant others in their children’s educational attainment. How they serve in this role traditionally is viewed in terms of class-based resources, such as educational expectations, monitoring, and coaching. Yet parental warmth or emotional support is only weakly linked to social class, and it serves as a powerful resource for educational attainment in its own right. The consequences of parental warmth for postsecondary attainment – children’s completion of a four-year college degree – have received only limited attention. In this study, I draw upon national data corresponding to two white twentieth-century birth cohorts (1921-1948 and 1949-1970; 1995 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States) and I examine cohort-, class- and gender-based contingencies for parental warmth. Results suggest two main takeaways for white respondents: that parental warmth carried general value for college completion for individuals born during the first half of the twentieth century, and that this value became conditional on class and gender during the latter half, increasingly favoring women with educated parents.

Author

• Matthew Andersson, Yale University