Should Mom go back to school? Post-natal educational attainment and parenting practices

Abstract

Although the relationship between educational attainment and parenting practices is well documented, it is typically examined at only one point in time. What happens if mothers acquire more education after the birth of their children: do they alter their parenting practices? Panel data models based on longitudinal data from ECLS-K indicate that changes in mother’s educational attainment are positively associated with increases in parental school involvement, having books in the home, and participating in non-academic family activities, but not with attitudes toward discipline. Although post-natal maternal education does not change all aspects of parenting, our findings are broadly consistent with the theory of cultural mobility and provide insights into the extent of socio-cultural mobility in contemporary American society.

Introduction

Social class is related to many aspects of individuals’ lives, including parenting practices. From the classic works by Kohn, 1963, Kohn, 1977 and Bernstein (1971) to more contemporary research by Lareau, 2002, Lareau, 2003 and others, scholars have documented differences in parenting practices across social classes (Farkas, 2003, Hoff et al., 2002). This research typically views social class and parenting as static: studies in this tradition often examine the relationship between social class and parenting practices at a specific point in time. The implicit assumption in these studies is that parents’ social class, and thus their approach to parenting, does not change substantially over the life course.

We re-evaluate that assumption. The modal sequence for young adults transitioning to adulthood is to postpone child-bearing until after the completion of formal education, but the proportion of young adults following that modal sequence has declined as life course trajectories have become increasingly variable (Shanahan, 2000). One particularly notable change has involved the timing of child-bearing relative to formal education. Today, more than a quarter of undergraduates at American institutions of higher education have dependents (NCES, 2002) and the share of American undergraduates who are single parents has more than doubled over the past 20 years (Goldrick-Rab and Sorensen, 2010). Given the intertwined sequences of schooling and parenting, do changes in mothers’ educational attainment alter their parenting practices?

Previous research demonstrates that highly educated mothers and fathers parent differently from less-educated parents (c.f. Attewell and Lavin, 2007, Carneiro et al., 2007, Hill and Stafford, 1980, Oreopoulos and Salvanes, 2009, Sayer et al., 2004). These findings imply that exposure to education changes parenting behaviors and attitudes. If parenting behaviors and attitudes are a manifestation of cultural capital, these findings suggest that educational access leads to socio-cultural mobility over the life course. However, since the vast majority of previous research is based on cross-sectional data, it is difficult to separate the sources of educational attainment from its consequences.

In this paper, we address this difficulty by tracing changes in mothers’ educational attainment and parenting behaviors during their children’s early elementary school years using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study’s Kindergarten cohort. Since a substantial proportion of mothers in the sample continue to pursue education after their children are born, these data provide a unique opportunity to observe the extent to which parenting practices respond to educational attainment. After presenting cross-sectional models similar to those in the previous literature, we construct panel data models of the effects of changes in maternal education on change in parenting behavior. Unlike traditional cross-sectional models, our longitudinal models control for all characteristics of mothers and children that do not change over time. As a result, they generate relatively unbiased estimates of the effect of education on the parenting behavior of mothers who pursue post-natal education.

Our analyses suggest that post-natal maternal education influences several parenting practices which previous research has suggested are associated with children’s academic success. In particular, we find strong evidence to suggest that post-natal maternal educational attainment increases mothers’ involvement in their children’s elementary schools, number of books in the home, and the frequency with which mothers and children engage in non-academic family activities. However, changes in mother’s educational attainment are not associated with changes in attitudes toward discipline. These results provide new insights into the role of education in facilitating socio-cultural mobility.

A long line of sociological research demonstrates a relationship between social class and parenting. While research in this tradition spans more than a century, employs diverse methods, and focuses on several different aspects of parent/child relationships, it has consistently reported large and robust differences between upper-, middle-, and working-class parenting practices (c.f. Lynd and Lynd, 1956, Gans, 1962, Bronfenbrenner, 1958, Kohn, 1963, Lareau, 2000, Lareau, 2003, Hart and Risely, 1995, Bradley et al., 2003, Bodovski and Farkas, 2008). Lareau’s ethnographic study of parenting practices of middle class and working class/poor families, in particular, has garnered much attention. Instead of examining specific parenting practices individually, Lareau, 2002, Lareau, 2003 describes class-based differences in parenting styles. She proposes that middle-class parents engage in a “concerted cultivation” style of parenting, which is exemplified by a deliberate cultivation of children’s skills and talents, while working class parents engage in an “accomplishment of natural growth” style of parenting, which allows children to grow up in a more spontaneous manner. These differences in parenting styles help to reproduce class inequalities across generations. Lareau argues that concerted cultivation fosters a set of attitudes and behaviors among middle class children that are rewarded by institutions such as schools and thus facilitate their educational success.

Although previous studies rely on varying definitions of social class, a subset of this research tradition focuses specifically on the association between parental education and parenting practices, which is particularly relevant for our study. Time-use data from the United States and elsewhere indicate that highly educated mothers and fathers spend more time on average with their children than do less educated parents (Hill and Stafford, 1980, Sayer et al., 2004). Furthermore, there are important qualitative differences between the parenting practices of highly educated and less highly educated parents. Highly educated parents spend more time reading to their children than do less educated parents (Hill and Stafford, 1980, Huston and Aronson, 2005), and the children of highly educated parents spend more time reading to themselves and studying than do children of less educated parents (Bianchi and Robinson, 1997). Similarly, survey data suggest that highly educated parents have different approaches to parenting than do less highly educated parents. Oreopoulos and Salvanes (2009), for example, demonstrate that college-educated adults are less likely to favor spanking and other forms of corporal discipline than less highly educated adults.

Taken together, these findings indicate that parental education is closely related to parenting behavior. However, the nature of that relationship is less clear since parental education is associated with a host of factors that are likely also associated with parenting (including the practices and attitudes that parents learned from their own parents, family income and other economic and cultural resources, parental and child intelligence, motivation, and expectations.) Does formal education change the way individuals parent? Or is the relationship spurious, such that the same personal characteristics that lead individuals to pursue education also influence parenting behaviors?

Previous research on cultural stratification provides two different frameworks for considering these questions. Theories in the cultural reproduction tradition hold that schools primarily reproduce social inequalities, rather than create opportunities for social mobility (c.f. Bowles and Gintis, 1976). Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital is perhaps the most fully articulated of these theories. Bourdieu argues that differences in family life and values lead children to develop “linguistic and cultural competencies” and “familiarity with culture” that are closely associated with their family’s class background (Bourdieu, 1973, p. 494; see also Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Since educators and other socio-cultural gatekeepers typically come from relatively advantaged backgrounds, schools tend to recognize and reward the cultural inheritances that upper-class children share, rather than those shared by lower-class students (Lamont and Lareau, 1988, Lareau and Weininger, 2003). Upper-class cultural capital, therefore, facilitates school success for children from upper class families. In the process, it helps students from advantaged backgrounds acquire high-status careers and eventually pass their advantages onto their own children.

The cultural mobility model, on the other hand, emphasizes the possibility for individuals to acquire cultural capital outside of their families and use that newly acquired cultural capital as a vehicle for upward mobility. Drawing on Weber’s (1968) work on status cultures, DiMaggio (1982) argues that an individual can acquire familiarity with the dominant culture in settings other than the family and be rewarded for this familiarity. While this view acknowledges that family upbringing is one avenue for acquiring cultural capital, it holds that some individuals may change their social status by acquiring cultural capital during the life course (see also Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997), particularly in the course of formal schooling (Reay, 2004). Research in this tradition also suggests that individuals from less advantaged backgrounds may receive greater rewards for the possession of cultural capital (De Graaf et al., 2000, DiMaggio, 1982, Dumais, 2006).

Following each of these theoretical frameworks, we can conceptualize parenting practices as a manifestation of parents’ cultural capital and a source of children’s cultural capital.¹ The two frameworks, however, differ in the way they understand the relationship between cultural capital and schooling. The cultural reproduction argument places an emphasis on family as a site of cultural capital production. Although in some of the later writings, Bourdieu acknowledged the possibility of individuals acquiring cultural capital through schooling, that possibility is limited because less advantaged children lack an appropriate habitus and thus are not likely to learn as quickly or acquire the ‘natural familiarly’ with schooling practices (Bourdieu, 1973). Education in this framework largely reproduces existing class differences that originate in the family. Acquiring more education would thus not necessarily lead to more cultural capital, or in the specific context we are examining, more schooling would not necessarily alter individual’s parenting practices. The cultural mobility argument is much more open to education acting as a mechanism of mobility, i.e., as providing less advantaged children with the necessary skills and attitudes as well rewarding them for acquisition of cultural capital. Cultural mobility scholars would thus be more inclined to expect that acquiring more education would play a role in altering individual cultural capital, and by extension shape their parenting practices.

In this paper, therefore, we examine the extent to which formal education alters the way individuals parent. Our analyses pay close attention to the ways parenting practices change for mothers who acquire new levels of educational attainment while their children are in elementary school in order to estimate the effect of educational attainment on parenting. This approach has two distinct advantages: First, by comparing mothers who complete further education with themselves (rather than comparing highly educated mothers with less highly educated mothers), our analyses produce estimates of the effects of education on parenting that are not biased by the relationship between time-invariable maternal and child characteristics and maternal educational attainment.² Second, rather than estimating the average effects of maternal education across the population, our analyses provide particular insight on mothers who are most likely to pursue formal education after childbirth.

Several studies have considered the causal effects of educational attainment on a host of market outcomes (see Wolfe and Haveman (2003) for a recent review) and a growing literature investigates the effects of educational attainment on non-market outcomes such as civic engagement (c.f. Dee, 2004). However, relatively few existing studies explicitly model the causal effect of education on parenting, with some notable exceptions, such as Attewell and Lavin (2007). Using a propensity score matching approach, Attewell and Lavin demonstrate that maternal educational attainment has a positive effect on the cognitive stimulation and emotional support she provides for her children, the extent to which she is involved in her children’s school, and her educational attainment. Attewell and Lavin report, for example, that mothers who earn bachelor’s degrees score approximately one-fourth of a standard deviation higher on the HOME cognitive stimulation scale than they would have had they attained no further education after high school. Carneiro et al. (2007) reach similar conclusions using variation in the cost of education as an instrumental variable to estimate the effect of maternal educational attainment on parenting.

Attewell and Lavin point to two primary mechanisms that may explain the relationship between maternal educational attainment and parenting practices. First, they hypothesize that educational attainment may influence parenting by increasing mothers’ knowledge. If formal education increases maternal appreciation of history, music, art, or other sorts of high culture, educational attainment may encourage mothers to share these interests with their children, boosting their cultural capital. More broadly, formal schooling may also influence parenting behaviors by exposing mothers to new information about child development and education. Second, Attewell and Lavin hypothesize that education may influence parenting behaviors by exposing mothers to the behaviors and attitudes of higher status peers. Ethnographic studies of working class students in higher education clearly indicate that many students view formal education as a site for social mobility (c.f. Lehmann, 2009, Reay et al., 2009). As the following quotation from one working class student enrolled in a research university suggests (Lehmann, 2009, p. 642), students may study their peers for clues about how to raise middle class children: “I’m trying to move up in society, to become these people that have just lived with privilege all their lives and it’s normal for them. For me, it’s not normal, but it will become normal for my children.”³

Following these insights, we investigate the effects of post-natal educational attainment on a range of parenting practices, including involvement in children’s elementary schools, the number of children’s books in the home, attitudes toward discipline, and parent–child interaction. Two of these parenting practices – parental school involvement and books in the home – may most directly influence children’s interaction with school as an institution, and are thus particularly relevant to the process of intergenerational inequality that Bourdieu describes. Moreover, all four parenting practices have commonly been considered in the research on the transmission of class advantage across generations. Following Lareau (2003), a number of recent studies have aimed to capture different dimensions of the concerned cultivation style of parenting, including parental-child interaction, parental involvement in schools, and child’s participation in extracurricular activities. Some studies have combined indicators of each of these aspects of parenting into composite measures (e.g., Bodovski and Farkas, 2008, Cheadle, 2008, Roksa and Potter, 2011) while others have focused on a specific dimension, such as parental involvement in schools (e.g., Parcel and Dufur, 2001, Crosnoe, 2004, Kelly, 2004, Domina, 2005). Similarly, the number of books in the home is often used as an indicator of parental efforts to enrich children’s educational experiences and produce a cognitively stimulating home environment (e.g., Bodovski and Farkas, 2008, Cheadle, 2008, see also Teachman, 1987). Discipline – although less commonly considered in recent sociological research – constitutes an important aspect of parenting discussed by Lareau (2003) and highlighted in classic studies of class inequality (e.g., Kohn, 1977). Moreover, social psychologists, who have been more inclined to examine disciplinary practices, demonstrate the relevance of this aspect of parenting for children’s outcomes (e.g., Dornbusch et al., 1987, Landry et al., 2000, Steinberg et al., 1989). While none of the quantitative measures can reflect the totality of parenting practices, and while none of the datasets include all of the relevant aspects of parenting, previous studies have aimed to capture different dimensions of family contexts to the extent possible. We follow this practice and explore a range of different practices available in the dataset and shown by the previous research to be differentially distributed by social class and related to children’s educational outcomes.

If Attewell and Lavin’s hypothesis that education influences parenting via both knowledge acquisition and imitation is correct, we would expect educational exposure to lead mothers to be more involved in their children’s schools, to have more children’s books in home, to have a relatively communicative disciplinary style, and to interact more frequently with their children. However, the magnitude of this effect is far from clear. Women who pursue further education after childbirth tend to come from less advantaged backgrounds than traditional students. Disproportionately black, Hispanic, and Native American, these women are more likely to mix schooling with work and are considerably less likely to graduate on time (Goldrick-Rab and Sorensen, 2010). These demographic characteristics could either dilute or magnify the effects of education on parenting. Furthermore, Elman and O’Rand (2004) suggest that delayed educational attainment conveys smaller positive labor market effects than on-time educational attainment. It is possible that the effects of education on parenting could be similarly contingent on the timing of education. If mothers of school-aged children already have firmly established parenting attitudes and routines, acquiring education after children enter schooling could be only weakly related to parenting practices. On the other hand, these mothers may be particularly inclined to note the lessons implicit in their schooling for their own children and change their parenting behaviors accordingly.