Expanding notions of social reproduction: Grandparents’ educational attainment and grandchildren's cognitive skills

doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2010.10.001

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 26, Issue 2, 2nd Quarter 2011, Pages 216-226

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2010.10.001 Get rights and content

Abstract

Inherited privilege and status remain powerful factors in the distribution of opportunity in American life. These transfers of socioeconomic resources across generations are facilitated by the links between adult educational attainment and children's cognitive skills. Our current study expands the notion of social reproduction beyond this narrow two-generation approach to investigate the links between grandparents’ educational attainment and their grandchildren's academic abilities. Using a nationally representative sample of over 13,000 children who participated in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), we find that familial advantages in human capital persist over time and that these advantages are associated with improved cognitive outcomes among later generations. Even after controlling for a wide array of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, young children with college-educated grandparents possess stronger literacy and mathematics skills at the start of formal schooling. Propensity score approaches, which address concerns regarding the endogeneity inherent in the topic, yield similar results, suggesting the robustness of our findings.

Research highlights

▶ Young children with college-educated grandparents have stronger literacy and math skills at the start of school than children with grandparents with less education, even after controlling for parent education and other demographic factors.

Section snippets

Background

We situate this study within both micro- and macro-level conceptualizations of child development. At the micro level, our analyses are informed by developmental ecological theory, which recognizes that cognitive development flows from multiple sources related to children's environments (see Bronfenbrenner, 1979, Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 1998). The social, economic, and physical contexts in which young children's lives are enmeshed form an ecology of interconnected factors that support their

Social reproduction

Inherited privilege and status remain powerful factors in the distribution of opportunity in American life. Indeed, one of the least disputed findings within the social science literature is that parents pass on a portion of their socioeconomic advantage (or disadvantage) to their children (see Brooks-Gunn and Duncan, 1997, Jencks et al., 1972, Mayer, 1997). The topic has occupied social scientists for nearly a century. Two of the earliest studies in this arena, Lynd and Lynd's (1929) Middletown

Three generations: considering the role of grandparents

Systematic research on grandparenthood began during the latter half of the twentieth century; previously, studies were based on anecdotal evidence that portrayed grandparents as a disturbance to the normal functioning of the nuclear family (Tomlin, 1998). As recently as the 1980s, studies essentially ignored the influence of grandparents on grandchildren, arguing that the real forces of socialization operated only through parents (Szinovacz, 1998). A developing literature, however, is examining

Challenges of estimating grandparent effects

In addition to OLS regression techniques, this study also employs propensity score matching, which addresses concerns regarding the endogeneity inherent in our research questions. Although randomization arguably produces the most robust treatment estimates, psychologists and social scientists often investigate topics that for temporal, logistical, and/or ethical reasons do not lend themselves well to random assignment. This is certainly the case in the context of our current study, as

Research focus

The importance of parental social class to child outcomes is well documented. More recently, however, researchers have begun to expand their scope beyond two generations to investigate the direct and indirect role grandparents play in their grandchildren's social and academic development. Clearly, grandparent influences are important to consider for both their micro-level effects on children's cognitive growth and their macro-level implications for socioeconomic reproduction. As more children

Data

This study employed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), sponsored by the National Center of Education Statistics (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2004b). The ECLS-K collection of base-year (1998) data followed a stratified random design structure. The primary sampling units were geographic areas consisting of counties or groups of counties from which about 1000 public and private schools offering kindergarten programs were selected. A

Descriptive results

Table 2 presents information on children's cognitive and socio-demographic backgrounds organized by their grandparents’ educational attainment. These descriptive results address the first of our three research questions. A strong linear relationship is evident between children's cognitive skills and their grandparents’ level of education. A roughly one-third standard deviation gap in initial mathematics and literacy skills separates children with college-educated grandparents from those whose

Analytic results

The previous section presented descriptive analyses exploring the associations between grandparents’ education and their grandchildren's cognitive profiles and socio-demographic backgrounds. The aim here is to investigate these complex and interrelated associations within a multivariate framework that identifies the unique links between grandparent educational attainment and their grandchildren's cognitive outcomes. Table 3, Table 4 present multivariate regression models predicting young

Regression-adjusted propensity matched estimates

We began this stage of the analyses by constructing a sample containing comparable treatment and control groups. Table 5, which displays the results for the probit estimation, indicates that parents’ high school educational background and welfare receipt were strong predictors of grandparent educational attainment. The next step in the propensity analysis required matching the treated and control groups. Each individual child in the treatment group was paired with a child in the control group

Discussion

The intergenerational crystallization of socioeconomic advantage has generated vigorous debate among social scientists, policymakers, and the public. Our current study confirms that historical disadvantages in educational attainment represent an additional source of variability in child outcomes. Across multiple cognitive and socio-demographic dimensions, children with more-educated grandparents differ systematically from those with less-educated grandparents. Indeed, our study suggests

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As an example, scholars (e.g., Braun and Stuhler, 2018; Neidhöfer and Stockhausen, 2018) have examined whether the grandparent-to-offspring association remains after interacting the grandparents’ socio-economic status with a dummy variable controlling for whether the grandparents were still alive at the date of birth of the grandchild. Other studies instead exploit information on whether grandparents were co-resident with the offspring and parents during the childhood of the former (e.g., Ferguson and Ready, 2011; Kroeger and Thompson, 2016; Zeng and Xie, 2014). Overall, while Zeng and Xie (2014) find that the “[...] causal processes of intergenerational influence occur primarily inside households through daily interaction” (Zeng and Xie, 2014, p. 614), other research testing such a contact-based mechanism of transmission is usually not supportive of a direct grandparental effect (e.g., Ferguson and Ready, 2011; Braun and Stuhler, 2018).
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Since then, research on multigenerational social mobility has exploded, culminating in recent analyses in a special issue on “Inequality Across Multiple Generations” in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (Pfeffer, 2014), major review pieces on grandparent effects in Sociological Science (Anderson, Sheppard, & Monden, 2018) and The Economic Journal (Solon, 2018), and high-profile research in the top sociology and demography journals in the U.S. and Europe (Andrade & Thomsen, 2018; Belsky et al., 2018; Braun & Stuhler, 2018; Erola, Kilpi-Jakonen, Prix, & Lehti, 2018; Pfeffer & Killewald, 2018; Sheppard & Monden, 2018). Researchers continue to build a robust literature on multigenerational mobility using data from a variety of countries – Australia (Hancock, Mitrou, Povey, Campbell, & Zubrick, 2016), Chile (Celhay & Gallegos, 2015), China (Zeng & Xie, 2014), Denmark (Møllegaard & Jæger, 2015), Finland (Lehti, Erola, & Tanskanen, 2018), Germany (Hertel & Groh-Samberg, 2014), Mexico (Arenas, 2017), the Netherlands (Bol & Kalmijn, 2016), Sweden (Hällsten, 2014; Modin, Erikson, & Vågerö, 2013), Taiwan (Chiang & Park, 2015), the United Kingdom (Chan & Boliver, 2013), and the United States (Ferguson & Ready, 2011; Hertel & Groh-Samberg, 2014; Jæger, 2012; Wightman & Danziger, 2014) – and data types – from historical and genealogical records (Clark, 2014; Knigge, 2016; Piraino, Muller, Cilliers, & Fourie, 2014; Song & Campbell, 2017) to multi-wave longitudinal surveys and register data (Ferrie, Massey, & Rothbaum, 2016; Hällsten & Pfeffer, 2017; Kolk, 2014; Park & Kuentae, 2019; Pfeffer & Killewald, 2018). The massive variation in time, contexts, data quality, and analysis choices throughout the literature, along with researchers’ inability to test all mechanisms simultaneously in any given dataset, arguably provides a fragmented view of both the existence of multigenerational effects at all and the causal pathways of these effects.
Following Mare’s (2011) presidential address to the Population Association of America, much research has examined the dynamics of intergenerational mobility and socioeconomic inequality. However, this research is starkly divided on the existence of multigenerational effects and pathways. In this article, we examine educational attainment across three generations using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We test three key hypothesized mechanisms of grandparent educational advantage transmission that have been documented in international samples: compensation and augmentation, grandparent lifespan, and genetic transmission. To further interrogate how these mechanisms function across social contexts, we also race-stratify all analyses. As a more stringent test, we also test all hypotheses using cousin fixed effects models. We find no evidence in favor of the compensation hypothesis, but do find descriptive support for the augmentation hypothesis, as well as some limited support among whites for college graduation outcomes in cousin fixed effects models. Findings on the lifespan overlap and genetic transmission hypotheses are highly race-stratified. Overall, our findings support the importance of investigating the mechanisms of three-generation processes of educational attainment across contexts and sub-groups.
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Grandparents may also affect grandchildren in less direct ways. For example, grandchildren may benefit from a secure and stable environment, such as living in a catchment area with good schools, which grandparents contribute financially to securing (Ferguson and Ready, 2011; Hagestad, 2006). One of the most important ways in which grandparents affect grandchildren's attainment is through transferring their knowledge, attitudes, values and family ‘ethos’ accruing from their socio-economic positions and life-long experiences (Portes et al., 2009).
This study examines grandparents' effects on grandchildren in contemporary British society. We begin with grandchildren's occupational aspiration in their adolescent years and move on to assess their educational and class attainment in adulthood. Using the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we find persisting grandparental effects in all three domains even after controlling for parents' socio-economic-cultural resources and other demographic and contextual factors. In addition, we find that self-employed grandparents have a strong impact on grandsons' (albeit not on granddaughters') likelihood of engagement in self-employment, a pattern that holds true even when parents are not self-employed. Our study shows that grandparents' class still affects grandchildren's life chances in contemporary UK society just as earlier research showed for mid-20th century Britain and that the effects are manifested at different stages of the life course, from occupational aspiration as teenagers to educational attainment as young adults to occupational destination as adults.
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¹: The authors are listed alphabetically and each contributed equally to this work.

²: Jason Ferguson's efforts were supported in part by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

View full text

Expanding notions of social reproduction: Grandparents’ educational attainment and grandchildren's cognitive skills

Abstract

Research highlights

Section snippets

Background

Social reproduction

Three generations: considering the role of grandparents

Challenges of estimating grandparent effects

Research focus

Data

Descriptive results

Analytic results

Regression-adjusted propensity matched estimates

Discussion

Social Science Research

The life course of children born to unmarried mothers: Childhood living arrangements and young adult outcomes

Journal of Marriage and the Family

The grandparent/grandchild relationship: Family resource in an era of voluntary bonds

Family Relations

The treatise on the family

Human capital and the rise and fall of the family

Journal of Labor Economics

The American occupational structure

Outline of a theory of practice

The social space and the genesis of groups

Theory and Society

Grandmothers providing care for grandchildren: Consequences of various levels of caregiving

Family Relations

Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of American life

Schooling in capitalist America revisited

Sociology of Education

Regression and matching estimates of elite college attendance on education ad career achievement

Social Science Research

The ecology of human development

Children in families in communities: Risk and intervention in the Bronfenbrenner tradition

The effects of poverty on children

The Future of Children: Children and Poverty

The differential effects of repeating kindergarten

Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk

Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (Rev. ed.)

Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences (Rev. ed.)

Good things come in threes: Single-parent multigenerational family structure and adolescent adjustment

Demography

The influence of grandparents on grandchildren: A review of the literature and resources

Family Relations

The influence of grandparents in single-mother families

Journal of Marriage and Family

A theory of persistent income inequality

Journal of Economic Growth

The present and future of research on activity settings as developmental contexts

Theory-based interventions for school children cared for by their grandparents

Educational Psychology in Practice

Who is getting a college education? Family background and the growing gaps in enrollment

Children, schools, and inequality

Social mobility over three generations in Finland, 1950-2000

European Sociological Review

Comparative intergenerational stratification research: Three generations and beyond

Annual Review of Sociology

Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models

Multigenerational coresidence and welfare policy

Journal of Community Psychology

American parenting of language-learning children: Persisting differences in family-child interactions observed in natural home environments

Developmental Psychology

Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms