Cognitive Development in Early Childhood: Mechanisms over Three Generations

• In Event: 109 - Regular Session. Multigenerational Mobility

Abstract

Recent scholarship has proposed that multigenerational ties may influence child achievement above and beyond the role played by parents. However, the concrete pathways through which grandparents might matter remain unclear. I advance this literature by evaluating the pathways through which grandparents affect grandchildren’s vocabulary skills at age 5. I focus on three broad pathways: structural positions of parents, cultural mechanisms, and direct transmission. Using birth cohort data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, I find substantial associations between maternal grandparents’ education and grandchildren’s vocabulary skills, even within strata of parents’ education. Although structural positions of parents mediate about half of the association, I also find a sizeable role for cultural measures such as frequency of reading with the child. After accounting for these pathways, I find little evidence that the transmission of skills from grandparents to grandchildren arises from direct transmission. The results demonstrate how a three-generation paradigm can yield new insights to research on social mobility, highlighting the potentially important role played by cultural mechanisms that are rarely measured in large quantitative datasets.

Author

• Ian Lundberg, Princeton University