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Article Excerpt
Successful families pass on optimal values, beliefs, and behaviors regarding the importance of education, work, relationships, and good mental health to their children. How parents provide these socialization experiences is dependent on a variety of proximal factors including such characteristics as their own personality, their beliefs regarding appropriate child-rearing strategies, and the parenting behaviors that are manifested toward their children. These factors are also influenced by more distal socioeconomic status (SES) characteristics such as parents' own education, occupation, and income (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Conger & Donnellan, 2007). Parents' educational success has been shown to be particularly influential in predicting children's achievement (Corwyn & Bradley, 2003; Jimerson, Egeland, & Teo, 1999; Linver, Brooks-Gunn, & Kohen, 2002; Yeung, Linver, & Brooks-Gunn, 2002). Exploring how parents' education may have this influence on children's academic success has received less attention, however, even though some research has begun to suggest that parenting behaviors and race/ethnicity of the parent are important aspects to consider in the process (Corwyn & Bradley, 2003; Davis-Kean, 2005). In the past, studies have been hindered by a lack of diversity in participants and by the general absence of examination of the literature of normative samples of children of different race/ethnicity groups (Garcia Coll et al., 1996). Thus, there is little understanding of the complex role that SES, race/ethnicity, and parenting practices may play in the development of children (Conger & Donnellan, 2007). In order to address these limitations, it is important to examine family processes in data sets that have adequate representation of multiple racial groups. Thus, the goal of this article is to examine the process of how parents' educational attainment influences children's achievement through the beliefs and behaviors of parents and whether this influence varies by race/ethnicity. We will use a model that has been developed based on important tenets of family process and socialization models that include multiple aspects of the family climate as well as parental beliefs and behaviors. This model will allow us to examine how parents' educational attainment influences both the physical and social home environment of their children and how this environment may predict the changes in children's achievement across time and by racial/ethnic group.
The Influence of Socioeconomic Status: Income and Education
Research on the influence of SES on parenting suggests that both income and education may have important influences on a family's ability to provide a stimulating environment in the home that eventually contributes to successful outcomes for children (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Fox, Platz, & Bentley, 1995; McLeod & Shanahan, 1993). Families from lower SES backgrounds may not have access to the types of resources that are available for creating a stimulating and warm home environment and may be at higher risk for lower achievement (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; McLoyd, 1998; McLoyd & Wilson, 1991; Ramey & Ramey, 1998; Sugland et al., 1995). Often the mechanisms related to income and educational influences in the home are difficult to disentangle. Sometimes this is due to the examination of these constructs with a combination/global scale (e.g., Hollingshead Index) or using one or the other of these constructs (income, education, occupation) as a single proxy for SES. Thus, we are unable to determine whether income and education are having similar or distinct influences on families and outcomes. Some scholars have argued that they do indeed have differential influences (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Duncan & Magnuson, 2003). Recent research indicates that income and parent education provide unique influences on the home environment (Corwyn & Bradley, 2003; Davis-Kean, 2005). For example, Davis-Kean (2005) has found that parents' educational attainment has an indirect influence on child achievement through parents' expectations for their children's schooling, reading behavior in the home, parent-child warmth, and parent-child play activities. This influence, however, differed by race/ethnicity, with more of the indirect effects of these pathways being explained for African American families than for European American families. Income also had an association in these models, but it was limited; thus it was concluded that parents' educational attainment had a unique influence on parents' educational beliefs as well as their behavior. Similarly, research by Guo and Harris (2000) found that the influence of income on intellectual development was mediated by home environment (e.g., amount of books in the home), physical environment (e.g., clean home), and parenting style (e.g., parental affection/ warmth). Thus, having substantially lower income influenced both what parents provided in the home environment and how they interacted with their children. Both of these studies suggest that educational and economic resources were important for the cognitive development of children. These influences were multifaceted, including dimensions such as positive and warm interactions as well as behaviors such as purchasing books (Guo & Harris, 2000) and reading them to your children (Davis-Kean, 2005).
The warmth that parents are observed and reported to show to their children has consistently been related to achievement across multiple studies (Corwyn & Bradley, 2003; Davis-Kean, 2005; Hoffman, 2003; Kim & Rohner, 2002; Linver et al., 2002; Yeung et al., 2002). Bradley and colleagues (1989), for example, found that mothers in middle-class families with higher levels of education were more emotionally responsive (warm) to their children. Similarly, Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, and Duncan (1994) found that mother's education and income were both important to the physical environment and learning experiences in the home, but education alone was predictive of parental warmth. More highly educated mothers have more positive and less hostile parent-child interactions than those with lower education (Fox et al., 1995). A warm parenting environment has also been found to be strongly related to achievement in Korean American families, where cultural views had earlier favored a more authoritarian parent (low warmth, high control) as being the model for positive achievement outcomes (Kim & Rohner, 2002). Thus, not only is it important for parents to create a cognitively stimulating home environment, but it is also important to create an emotional environment that is supportive of the child and leads to optimum development.
The Unique Influence of Parents' Educational Attainment across Development
As mentioned previously, parents' educational attainment and income have similar relations to important aspects of the home environment. Some research suggests, however, that parents' educational attainment may have a stronger influence than income across development. Research by Duncan and Brooks-Gunn (1997) finds that family income has significant effects on children's outcomes at young ages (around 3 or 4 years of age), but this relation declines over time with no relation by adolescence. In contrast, the effects of parents' educational attainment appear to continue from early childhood into adolescence. This research is further supported by research by Davis-Kean (2005), who shows strong parents' education effects for children 8-12 years of age but almost no relation of income on parental beliefs and behaviors or children's achievement. Thus, parents' educational attainment appears to have an important relation with children's achievement and other developmental outcomes, and it is important to understand what may mediate or explain these differences across time.
Parents' Educational Attainment and Educational Beliefs and Behavior
There is also research to suggest that parents' educational attainment may also be important to the formation of beliefs regarding educational expectations for children. Alexander and colleagues (1994), for example, found that parents of moderate to high income and educational backgrounds held beliefs and expectations that were more accurate with the actual performance of their children, whereas low-income families had expectations that did not coincide with performance indicators. They suggest that the parents' ability to understand or take performance information into account is essential for structuring the home and educational environment for children so that they can excel in schooling endeavors and that this ability is related to parents' level of education. Similarly, Halle, Kurtz-Costes, and Mahoney (1997), using a sample of low-income minority families, found that parental expectations were important to subsequent achievement in math and reading. They found that parents' expectations about both current and future academic abilities were related to achievement behaviors in the home and that parental beliefs were related to children's self-perception and achievement. Davis-Kean (2005) also found that parents' expectations for schooling success was an important mediator in explaining the influence that parents' educational attainment had on children's achievement. In the study, home behaviors such as reading to children and warmth were found to be influenced by the expectations that parents had regarding future schooling success (e.g., graduating only high school or graduating college). Davis-Kean found that the pathways to achievement differed by race, with the influence of parents' education being fully mediated in the African American sample through parents' expectations and home behaviors. Parents' educational attainment still had a direct influence on children's achievement in the European American sample, suggesting that there were other aspects of the family or child that might be important in predicting achievement in this sample. However, this study was cross-sectional and could only examine relations at one time point. Thus, more research is needed to understand the important influence of both parental beliefs and behaviors on children's achievement and whether there are important differences by race/ethnicity on pathways to achievement.
The Important Role of Race/Ethnicity
Very little is known even in our current literature about how ethnic minority families promote achievement and what the successful pathways or mechanisms may be for predicting achievement and other developmental outcomes (Davis-Kean, 2005; Garcia Coll et al., 1996; Garcia Coll & Pachter, 2002). Part of the problem is that race and SES are confounded, and it is difficult to discern if research findings are related to race or SES differences (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). For example, much of the research that has focused on African American families has looked at low-income families and compared them to European American families in the middleclass, creating more of a deficit model than a process model of important differences in these families (Conger & Donnellan, 2007; Davis-Kean, 2005; Garcia Coll et al., 1996). We have even less knowledge of other ethnic groups even though there is some research beginning to emerge that examines SES and parenting influences in Hispanic and Asian samples and finds some important differences in the relation of parenting beliefs and behaviors to achievement and child development (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Conger & Donnellan, 2007; Sy & Schulenberg, 2005). For example, Parke et al. (2004) found that Mexican American children had more adjustment problems when they experienced parental conflict in the home than other race/ethnicities, perhaps suggesting that there are important emotional aspects of the home environment that may be important to examine for Mexican American families. Similarly, Sy and Schulenberg (1997) found that parent involvement by Asian American families differed in important ways from European American families. Both race/ethnic groups were academically successful, but Asian American families put more emphasis on home-related involvement (making sure homework was finished) than direct involvement in school activities (attending meetings and activities at school). Thus, there may be important cultural differences in how families think about and construct their home environment that influence the success of children in schooling. An important contribution of this article, then, will be to examine various parenting pathways that may have different but important implications to the achievement of children from different race/ethnicities.
Model of Parental Educational Attainment Influences
There are different theories and models on how family background or demographic variables influence child development. Some theorists have examined how negative SES factors might reduce positive parenting behaviors with subsequent detrimental effects on child outcomes. Good examples of these types of models are the income insufficiency models proposed by Conger et al. (1992) and McLoyd (1998) that dictate that parents who have lower income will have higher parental stress and lower mental health, which then negatively influences their parenting behaviors in the home with negative consequences for children's behavior (Conger et al., 2002; McLoyd, 1998; Mistry, Vandewater,...
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