The name is absent

Characteristics of the family

achievement as well as highlighting the mediating effect of parental beliefs and
behaviours on explanations of children’s outcomes here.

Ganzach also finds that parents’ education accounts for significantly more of the
explained variance in children’s cognitive ability than other possible factors,
including self-esteem, ethnic background, family composition and income.

Furthermore, his findings (from US NLSY data) are consistent with an offsetting
relationship between mother’s and father’s education; high education of one parent
can offset low education of the other.

However, while an effect of parental education on parental expectations is one
explanation for the correlation, it is also likely that parents with higher education have
higher attaining children for whom they therefore have higher expectations. In other
words expectations may be driven primarily by parents’ observations of the apparent
ability of their children. More useful for our purposes would be the correlation of
parental education and expectations conditional on the attainment of the child.

Moreover, parents whose belief in and valuation of education was high when they
were young are likely to both chose more education for themselves and to have higher
valuations of education for their children. Simple correlation of educational valuation
and parental education is not therefore proof of an effect of education, although the
theoretical grounds for such a link are strong. For example, Ganzach find a curvilinear
relationship between parents’ level of education and their children’s own educational
expectations. This relationship suggests that for parents with fewer than twelve years
of education (i.e. less than a high school graduate), the relationship between parents’
education and their children’s educational expectations is only slightly positive, while
for more than twelve years of education this relationship is much more positive. These
results also highlight the importance of children’s and teenager’s educational
expectations in predicting their educational attainment in adulthood.

Alexander et al. (1994) found that children of more highly educated parents were
more accurate in predicting their expected marks as well as more accurate in recalling
previous grades. Children of parents with lower levels of education consistently
overestimated both their previous and expected marks more often than children of
higher educated parents.

The authors argue that these inflated expectations are socially patterned and result
from differences in the human and social capital of parents and their families that
originate in differences in class background and life experience reflecting social
marginality. They suggest that the skills of dealing with the institution of school,
understanding the flow of information from school to home and relating such
understanding to their own lives are relatively lacking in lower SES and minority
households. See sections 3.3 for further discussion here.

Data from the US PSID-CDS (Trends, 2002) study shows an association between the
types of values that parents seek to instil in their children and parents’ own level of
education. For example, 74% of mothers educated to college degree level ranked

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