Introduction
development through its impact on the more proximal characteristics experienced by
the child such as good housing, toys, better schools and so on. These resources are
bought with income and thus mediate the income effect. Yet the nature of this effect
may depend on the parents’ level of education. Parents with higher levels of education
may spend income differently to those with lower education and so be better able to
protect children against the effects of poverty or derive greater developmental
advantages from high income. Similar relationships are proposed for education and
each of the other distal factors.
Turning to family characteristics, the same double effect of parents’ education may
apply. Education may influence mental health and well-being, thus having indirect
effects on children’s developmental outcomes. Education may also help parents
protect children against the impacts of ill-health or low levels of parental well-being,
thus moderating the effects of those characteristics on children.
Finally, in relation to proximal processes, there are again sound foundations for the
view that education will have the same double effect. First, education may improve
the likelihood of parents reading to their children, for example. It may also be that
education moderates the effects of proximal processes impacting, in the same
example, on the way parents read to children or on their choice of book and thus
moderating the nature of the developmental benefit for the child.
To conclude, we hypothesise that parental education is transmitted inter-
generationally through six pathways:
i. by impacting on key distal factors such as income and poverty;
ii. by moderating the effect of each distal factor, i.e. acting protectively and
providing resilience in the family;
iii. by impacting on the characteristics of contexts and hence on proximal
processes;
iv. by supporting individuals and families in managing a set of characteristics and
hence moderating the effect of characteristics;
v. by impacting on proximal processes such as learning behaviours in the home;
vi. by moderating the effects of proximal processes, changing the nature of their
influence.
In the following sections we describe these processes in more detail and discuss the
evidence on the inter-connecting links. However, the moderating role has not been
much researched and so we do not pursue it further here save for some remarks in the
concluding section. We focus instead on the indirect effects of education that operate
via the other factors at the different levels.
Sections 2, 4 and 5 work outwards from the child’s immediate environment and
consider the family proximal processes, characteristics within the family and distal
factors, respectively. Section 3 outlines the importance of other contexts and their
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