Toby L. Parcel and Joshua A. Hendrix
Scholars agree that inequality begins early in life. The families into which children are born provide resources children access beginning in infancy; families have unequal resources, and these differences influence the extent to which parents invest in their children as well as which investments they choose. We focus on two forms of investment – social and cultural capital. We believe that investments in these forms of capital play a major role in the unequal learning and social outcomes that children display as they move into adolescence and subsequent adulthood.
Our review is organized as follows. First, we offer a theoretical approach featuring social and cultural capital to unify what otherwise might seem to be unrelated perspectives on child and adolescent outcomes. We review literature that shows how social and cultural capital affects academic and social well-being. Referring to social well-being, we assume that delinquency is an indicator of poor social adjustment and so include a discussion of the effects of social and cultural capital on delinquency in our review. Second, we use a life course approach to summarize additional literature that takes either social or cultural capital, or both, seriously in determining several aspects of child and adolescent academic and social well-being. We devote particular attention to social class differences in patterns of investment. We conclude with discussion of unanswered questions and directions for future research.
In adopting this approach, we largely neglect the roles of human and financial capital, also important resources transmitted through families (Bradley and Corwyn, 2002; Conger and Donnellan, 2007). In addition, we omit much of the literature that discusses peers and adolescent networks as social capital (Haynie, 2001). Our review also precludes literature suggesting that children themselves can generate social capital useful in their own development (Offer and Schneider, 2007). While most of the empirical studies we cite focus on US populations, we set our review in international context through initial coverage of parental investment in several societies. We selectively note findings from non-US studies in subsequent sections and in our review of cultural capital theory. Most of the studies we include are quantitative.
A major function of the family is to produce and socialize children, something that has occurred throughout human history. Precisely, what is transmitted to children, however, is historically bound. Originally, parents socialized children for survival and to become productive accepted adults within their cultures. Thus, the transmission of social and cultural capital occurred within the context of daily life. In the United States, settlers in New England adopted this approach with strong emphasis on religious indoctrination and preparing children for sex-typed, productive, and reproductive roles in adulthood (Mintz and Kellogg, 1988). They also had clear traditions involving the transmission of financial capital across generations, which included giving land to first-born sons and providing dowries for daughters upon marriage. It was not until the late eighteenth century that families began to show increased concern for child development as we understand it, and by the early nineteenth century, childhood began to be viewed as a distinct phase of life (Mintz and Kellogg, 1988; see also Ariès, 1962). Adolescence was not a term used until the early twentieth century (Crosnoe and Johnson, 2011). Thus, modern notions of families transmitting social and cultural capital to children and adolescents are recent ones, and, as we develop later, are class bound.
Following Coleman (1988, 1990), by social capital, we understand resources that inhere in the relationships between and among actors and facilitate a range of social outcomes. Family social capital refers to the bonds between parents and children useful in promoting child socialization and, as such, includes the time and attention parents spend in interaction with children and in monitoring their activities and promoting child well-being (Kim and Schneider, 2005; Dufur, Parcel, and McKune, 2008). Furstenberg’s (2005, p. 810) definition of social capital as a “stock of social goodwill created through shared social norms and a sense of common membership” is compatible with our view; integration in a family system typically includes shared norms and feelings of belonging, as well as social support and increased connections. Noting Putnam’s (2000) distinction between bonding and bridging social capital, these intrafamily connections refer to bonding social capital, and these bonds are presumed to facilitate the positive growth of children and adolescents. Coleman also identifies time closure as a resource that encourages family bonding, because when parents are committed to one another and to children over an extended period of time, parental investments are likely to be greater and potentially more effective in socialization.
In addition, children benefit from the social connections that parents have with others such as neighbors, school personnel, and work colleagues (Johnson, Crosnoe, and Elder, 2001; Parcel and Dufur, 2001a, b; Crosnoe, 2004). Intergenerational closure, which Coleman defines as occurring when parents know their children’s friends’ parents, enables parents to pool resources in establishing and enforcing norms for children. Such connections beyond the family illustrate bridging social capital; the stronger these connections, the greater are the resources to which children have access. Critics of social capital theory contend that it fails to specify how families and individuals “generate, accumulate, manage, and deploy” social capital (Portes, 2000; Furstenberg, 2005, p. 809); this is not a debate we can fully adjudicate, although our review does speak to the deployment of social capital in the context of child and adolescent socialization.
Bourdieu (1973) posits that advantaged families equip their children with high-status cultural symbols that facilitate social selection into high-status domains; he developed this perspective within the context of European societies. More privileged families teach their children to cultivate certain preferences, behaviors, and attitudes that institutions, such as schools and organizations, value and reward (see Lamont and Lareau, 1988; Lareau and Weinberg, 2003). As a result, academic and economic discrepancies form between the children of families who can and cannot provide the resources necessary to cultivate these behaviors in their children. Thus, cultural capital is exclusionary and contributes to social reproduction (Kingston, 2001). Bourdieu treats cultural capital as highbrow competence and measures possession of capital as participation in and consumption of elite art, such as trips to museums and classical concerts (Jæger, 2009; Yamamoto and Brinton, 2010).
Other researchers conceptualize cultural capital differently, while still maintaining that early differences in cultural capital reproduce social class. Farkas’s (1996) approach to cultural capital emphasizes active parental investment in “skills, habits, and styles,” arguing that elite arts participation is irrelevant in the social context of the United States. Class-based investments that parents make via regular social interaction with their children lead middle- and upper-class children to be differentially prepared to navigate institutional settings, to be perceived favorably by teachers, and to see their own place in the status hierarchy as privileged (Wildhagen, 2009; Lareau, 2011). Some of these investments reflect different norms that middle- and upper-class parents inculcate in children, particularly with reference to valuing schooling as a vehicle for upward mobility or, at minimum, for status inheritance. Lareau’s work (2011), which we treat in more detail later, stresses the connections between childhood socialization strategies and activities in both childhood and adolescence. These several literatures combined suggest that parents are active and important agents who invest both social and cultural capital in their children, with the expectations that these investments will pay off in terms of future child and adolescent well-being.
This investment framework is also useful because, in addition to identifying family resources helpful to children, it also helps explain how resources can be diluted or diffused. For example, when there are more children in a family, all parental resources – social, financial, and cultural – are more finely spread across children (Downey, 2001; Sun and Li, 2009). In addition, as Coleman argues, when there are not two adults in the household or when maternal work takes mothers out of the home, investment in children may suffer. In a classic work, McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) provide strong support in the United States for Coleman’s assertion that children from single-parent families are worse off than those who grow up with both biological parents when it comes to school graduation, early parenthood, and occupational attainment. Although Coleman’s idea that there are dangers to long maternal work hours has received some support, the overall notion that maternal work outside the home hinders child development has been overgeneralized (Parcel and Menaghan, 1994a, b; Goldberg et al., 2008; see also Sayer, Bianchi, and Robinson, 2004). Comparative studies that assess children’s outcomes across nations provide additional support for the notion that maternal work is generally not harmful to children (Cooksey, Joshi, and Verropoulou, 2009). Still, the idea that family capital can be diluted persists, in part, because the greater the amount of time that mothers and fathers work would seem to limit the time they can spend investing in child well-being.
Another possibility, however, is that social and cultural resources interact in their effects on academic and social outcomes. Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1989) argues that child genetic potential interacts with institutional characteristics beginning with family characteristics, but also with the characteristics of the successively nested systems in which the child is embedded, including the school, neighborhood, and the larger economy. This conceptualization suggests considerable complexity to the processes through which parental investment is accomplished, in part because parents often influence the other contexts that children experience. In addition, given the potential for each context to affect children both additively and interactively, there are a multitude of pathways through which parental investment may operate. Similarly, Coleman (1988, 1990) argues that parental human capital, no matter how high, will not automatically result in improved child outcomes unless there is sufficient family social capital to allow children access to parental resources. For example, higher levels of maternal mental ability may be more consequential if mothers are more engaged with children’s schoolwork, thus supporting child intellectual development.
That these conditions are prevalent is widely believed in the social sciences because they reflect the idea that children who are favored in one context are often favored in another, thus leading to institutions that reinforce or exacerbate one another’s effects, either for good or for ill. These effects are resource boosters (Parcel and Dufur, 2001a) or complementary resources. For example, Crosnoe (2004) identifies interaction between family and school resources as part of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1989) mesosystem and finds resource boosters operative in his study of adolescent US academic achievement. If resource boosters are pervasive, inequality increases. As Haveman et al. (2004) and Bianchi et al. (2004) argue, as family income inequality has increased, variation in family ability to invest in children has increased, the fates of youth have become more sharply differentiated, and groups of the advantaged and disadvantaged have diverged (see also Heckman, 2008). Alternatively, some effects may interact and reach a limit, producing threshold or ceiling/floor effects. For example, perhaps a combination of strong parental social networks outside the home and strong parental bonding with children both promote child achievement, but in combination have more modest effects than the strictly additive models would suggest (Parcel and Dufur, 2001a). Thus, the joint effects of investments do not automatically boost or hinder children; under these conditions, the matching of resources across contexts becomes less consequential and, presumably, inequality is ameliorated, not exacerbated. We return to these ideas later.
The idea that parents can invest in children in ways that will benefit them later in life has received global support. Jæger and Holm (2007) decompose parental social class effects on the educational outcomes of Danish children and find that parental social and cultural capital operate as resources for children’s educational attainment. Specifically, parental access to cultural capital importantly explains child attainment of upper secondary education; social and economic capital are important in child completion of vocational education. Taken together, these three forms of capital substantially explain the raw effect of social class of children educational attainment. Pensiero (2011) investigates children’s reading ability and their locus of control in Great Britain. She finds that it is child engagement in cognitively stimulating activities, rather than participation in organized activities as such, that predicts these two outcomes. In addition, parental expectations, direct stimulation, parental interactions with the school, and children’s engagement in cognitively stimulating activities mediate more than half of the Socioeconomic Status (SES) effect, even in the presence of strong controls.
In a study of Netherlands families, De Graaf, De Graaf, and Kraaykamp (2000) demonstrate that parental reading behavior has a stronger effect than parental beaux arts participation on children’s educational attainment, particularly when the parents themselves have low levels of education. Also in the Netherlands, Notten, and Kraaykamp (2010) find that parental reading pays off for children, while parental television viewing is disadvantageous. Parents who select highbrow literature for their own reading promote educational success, while parental viewing of more popular television programs is disadvantageous. In addition, active parental investment in children’s reading, such as giving children books for holiday gifts and reading to young children and discussing books with them, has a positive effect on children’s educational attainment. Alternatively, Katsillis and Rubinson (1990) study Greece and find that although paternal social class and family SES influence student cultural capital, this form of capital itself does not translate into educational achievement; student ability and effort are much more consequential.
Studies of Asian samples take a somewhat different approach. Park, Byun, and Kim (2011) find that Korean parents invest considerable resources in locating and monitoring private tutors for their children. Those who do so invest have children with improved math and English test scores. Lee and Shouse (2011) find that such shadow education is tied to students’ desires to attend prestigious higher educational institutions. Yamamoto and Brinton (2010) argue that objectified cultural capital (family possession of a piano, antiques, or complete works of literature/encyclopedias) and embodied cultural capital (e.g., being read to by parents when young) are differently implicated in attainment at different points in the educational process in Japan and that these findings vary for male and females students. These investments are surely tied to parental financial capital in ways that are beyond the scope of this chapter but, more generally, suggest considerable interest in parental investment strategies contextualized within Asian as well as European societies. In particular, studies of parental investment in cultural capital in non-US societies provide welcome tests of social theory as well as findings specific to those countries.
A large body of US-based research links social capital to academic achievement and attainment among adolescents. Close ties to parents and high levels of intergenerational closure increase the likelihood of college attendance (Kim and Schneider, 2005), reduce school dropout rates (Carbonaro, 1998), and improve grades (Crosnoe, 2004). Furthermore, Kim and Schneider (2005) contend that social capital aligns adolescents’ and parents’ educational expectations, thus promoting academic achievement, even when parental financial capital is limited (see also Hao and Bonstead-Bruns, 1998). In this perspective, social capital promotes achievement by both heightening adolescents’ expectations for academic performance and mobilizing other types of resources that contribute positively to educational outcomes. In partial contrast, Morgan and Todd (2009) find that intergenerational closure is a modest contributor to adolescent achievement in Catholic schools, but comparable relationships in US public schools can be entirely explained by family background.
Both theory and research support the notion that forms of family capital may interact in their effects on youth outcomes. The existing literature on academic outcomes demonstrates that adolescents may only benefit from other types of capital (e.g., human capital, cultural capital) when family-based social capital is high (Parcel and Dufur, 2001a; Domina, 2005). Thus, while social and cultural capital represent distinct types of assets upon which young people can draw, they can condition one another’s utility (Vandewater and Lansford, 2005).
Overall, despite divergence in conceptualization and measurement of cultural capital, existing research indicates that cultural capital – whether tapped with measures of elite arts consumption or Cultural Extracurricular Activities (EAs) – improves educational outcomes (e.g., Dumais, 2002 for the United States; Jæger, 2009 for Denmark). More recently, Jæger (2011) finds modest effects of cultural capital on students’ reading and math achievement in the United States, with indicators reflecting highbrow culture and reading habits more consequential for upper SES students and concerted cultivation EAs more consequential for lower SES students. Roksa and Potter (2011) attribute some of the relationship between cultural capital and student achievement in the United States to parenting practices, thus speaking directly to issues of parental investment. Covay and Carbonaro (2010) study US elementary school children and find that the notable relationship between extracurricular academic activities and academic achievement is a function of the effect of these activities on noncognitive skill acquisition. We return to this issue later when we focus on social class differences in parenting practices.
Much of the literature covered earlier ties family investment in social and cultural capital to child academic outcomes. However, such investments also have major implications for child social adjustment, and its inverse, child behavior problems and juvenile delinquency. Although not always explicitly recognized, the underlying logic of many criminological theories is based on various forms of capital accumulation or capital scarcity. The attachment component of Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory emphasizes the strength of parent–child relationships, one form of social capital, as a precipitating factor for understanding delinquency. Specifically, when parent–child bonds are weak, children are more likely to engage in delinquency. Hirschi’s emphasis on the internalization of norms among children mirrors that of intergenerational closure because internalization of norms refers to the investments that parents make in their children. Although internalization of norms is largely achieved through direct parental supervision, the ultimate goal is to establish indirect control. Hirschi’s virtual supervision suggests that children who have internalized parental norms bring these norms with them even when outside of direct parental control; in the presence of a delinquent opportunity, they will ask themselves “what will my parents think?”
Sampson and Laub (1993) use social capital as a central concept in their age-graded theory of informal social control, suggesting that relationships marked by social capital produce obligation and mutual reciprocity among individuals and are thus a strong source of informal social control against criminal and deviant behaviors. Accordingly, institutional involvements, and especially familial involvement, are central for understanding individuals that drift in and out of criminal behavior over the life course. According to Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) self-control theory, parental socialization strategies (monitoring children, recognizing deviant behavior when it occurs, and correcting deviant behavior) produce the capacity for self-regulation in children. This quality enables children to delay gratification and to consider long-term consequences of their actions, thus providing the necessary skills for future success in important societal institutions. In addition, Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997) underscore the importance of collective efficacy for understanding variation in neighborhood crime rates, with collective efficacy reflecting a version of social capital tapping the willingness of individuals in a neighborhood to work together toward goals such as crime control.
Parcel and Menaghan (1993, 1994a, b) demonstrate that parental investment in family social capital reduces the risk of children’s behavior problems. Stronger home environments lower the risk of behavior problems, as does stronger maternal self-concept and the mother being married (Parcel and Menaghan, 1994b). Parental overtime work is a risk factor if additional children are recently born into the family. Parcel and Menaghan (1994a) demonstrate that low paternal working hours during early childhood is associated with elevated child behavior problems at ages 3–6, but that maternal work hours do not have comparable effects. In addition, Dufur, Parcel, and McKune (2008) demonstrate that social capital at home is more consequential than social capital at school in reducing the risk of children’s behavior problems.
Many studies find general support for the notion that parent–child attachment is a significant buffer against delinquent or risky behavior for adolescents (Rankin and Kerns, 1994; Dornbusch et al., 2001). Criminologists posit that children who have strong attachments to their parents avoid engaging in delinquency because they perceive that such behaviors will damage relationships with parents (Hirschi, 1969). Wright and Fitzpatrick (2006) find that significant parental involvement and strong parent–child attachment reduce violent behavior and enhance emotional and social skills. Wright, Cullen, and Miller (2001) find that children with high levels of family capital internalize prosocial norms, are successful in school, and are less likely to associate with delinquent friends and to engage in delinquency. As Salmi and Kivivuori (2006) report, weak parental support is associated with delinquent behavior irrespective of structural and individual level controls.
As some authors argue, close parent–child relationships are important for curbing delinquent behaviors among children, but direct parental control strategies such as monitoring and supervision have a stronger effect (Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986). Criminologists contend that parental supervision plays a central role in the development of self-control in children (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990) and reduces children’s time spent in unstructured socializing with peers (Osgood and Anderson, 2004). Indeed, research suggests that children who spend significant amounts of time outside of parental control are more likely to engage in delinquent behavior than more sufficiently controlled children (Demuth and Brown, 2004). The findings of these studies align well with Coleman’s argument that parents must be physically available for children in order to transmit social capital. As Hoffmann and Dufur (2008) note, many studies that predict delinquency focus on family structure as a key explanatory variable; it can act as a proxy for social capital because single-mother families are not typically capable of providing as much social capital to children compared to two-parent families (see also Demuth and Brown, 2004).
As Gauthier and DeGusti (2012) suggest, parental investment in children in the form of shared activities and positive parenting has important influence on children’s well-being, but the time that parents devote to their children varies considerably across countries. Cross-national variations in parental investment are affected by the countries’ level of economic development, the structure of the labor market, work–family support, and societal norms. For example, they argue that Nordic countries, which are characterized by relatively low hours of paid work among workers, a general view toward work as necessary for survival more so than self-expression, and high gender equality, are also characterized by high levels of father–child time. Contrastingly, Eastern European countries are characterized by low levels of maternal and paternal time with children, possibly explained by these countries having lower levels of economic development, higher hours of paid work, and lower levels of gender equality. In France, parents spend comparatively little time in childcare, and this may be a function of the low level of gender equality and the preference for public childcare (see also Sayer and Gornick, 2011).
Other literature suggests that different parenting styles can have unique effects on parent–child investments. Baumrind’s (1971) classic taxonomy (later extended by Maccoby and Martin, 1983) describes four parenting styles: authoritative (high support, high control), authoritarian (low support, high control), overly permissive (high support, low control), and neglectful (low support, low control). US and UK contexts have generally touted authoritative parenting as the most optimal strategy, as it fosters autonomous decision-making among children and is linked to academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems (Steinberg, Elmen, and Mounts, 1989; Grolnick et al., 2000).
However, within the United States, this classification system may not adequately characterize the parenting styles of racial minority groups. Some African American parents employ more control and less warmth than Caucasian parents as a means of enabling children to manage ethnic and racial barriers (Garcia-Coll, 1990). Latino families may be more likely to exhibit warm parenting practices but with less control over their children as a function of the shared extended-kin responsibility for child-rearing (Baca Zinn, 1994). Preferences for authoritative parenting in the United States and United Kingdom may not accurately depict preferred parenting styles across the globe. Whereas many American parents worry that overstressing academic success is unhealthy for their children’s emotional development, many parents in China and Korea believe that academic achievement is a reflection of effective parenting (Chao and Tseng, 2002). French parents wait longer periods before responding to their children’s cries in order to teach their children that the world does not revolve around them. Additionally, French parents are less likely to embrace the view that children need access to choices as a means of promoting autonomous decision-making (Druckerman, 2012). Studies in Egypt (von der Lippe, 1999) and China (Chen, Dong, and Zhou, 1997) suggest that parenting strategies are heavily influenced by social class, with more educated parents preferring authoritative parenting styles.
EAs represent one avenue through which parents invest in adolescents. Research finds that children who participate in EAs are less likely to engage in delinquency and other risky behaviors than children who are uninvolved in such activities (Mahoney and Cairns, 1997; Mahoney, 2000). Why is this? One view is that children who participate in EAs have significantly less time to spend in unstructured and unsupervised activities, which are more likely to produce environments conducive to delinquency (Osgood et al., 1996). Others suggest that EAs give children access to conventional role models (i.e., coaches and teachers) who promote conventional values (Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen, 1993).
Alternatively, such activities may affect delinquency indirectly, because they cultivate in children a number of culturally and socially valued traits that enhance their prosocial opportunities. EAs may enhance children’s sense of competitiveness and their ability to work well with peers and adults (Danish and Gullotta, 2000), in addition to improving their confidence levels and psychological well-being (Mahoney and Cairns, 1997). Accordingly, children who accumulate these traits are likely to succeed in institutional settings such as school and thus have more to lose by engaging in various forms of misconduct (Hirschi, 1969).
These positive effects may not operate uniformly under all conditions. Some research finds that participation in nonathletic activities such as school clubs and student government, and in organizations formed for students who have high academic achievements (known as honor societies in the United States), buffer children’s delinquent trajectories more so than participation in school sports (Hoffmann, 2006). Some studies link athletic participation to increased opportunities for sexual experimentation (Miller et al., 1998) and increased use of alcohol (Eccles et al., 2003). Athletics may indirectly encourage delinquency by promoting aggressiveness (Burton and Marshall, 2005) and also by significantly reducing the time that children spend with family members (Mahoney, Cairns, and Farmer, 2003).
EAs may also have different effects depending on the child’s gender. Hoffman (2006) shows that athletic participation protects against sexual behavior and alcohol use among girls but not among boys, possibly because these behaviors may enhance social status for males but not for females. Also, the relationship between EAs and delinquency depends on the SES of the school in which the activities are available (Hoffmann and Xu, 2002). Together, these findings indicate that the relationship between EA participation and behavioral outcomes is contingent upon individual and contextual-level factors.
Additional literature suggests that children’s participation in community-oriented activities may also act as an important means for children to achieve cultural capital and to abstain from participation in delinquency and other risky behaviors (Hoffmann, 2006). Involvement in community activities may instill in children civic-minded values (Youniss and Yates, 1997), enhance their social networks (Hanks and Eckland, 1978), and encourage a broader and more compassionate worldview (Wuthnow, 1991). However, the socioeconomic context of the community conditions the extent to which community involvement benefits children’s educational and behavioral outcomes (see Hoffmann and Xu, 2002 for a review).
As noted earlier, scholars have become increasingly attuned to the inequality of family resources as they impact young children’s development and have argued that by the time children reach school age, their educational environments have already prepared them either well or poorly for formal schooling (Heckman, 2008). Over time, initial disadvantages may be compounded, not ameliorated, by unequal environments elsewhere, so that boosting is cumulatively negative instead of positive, thus exacerbating inequality. Alternatively, if higher levels of resources in one context can compensate for lower levels in another (threshold effects), inequality will be (somewhat) ameliorated. We have a poor understanding of the extent to which parental resources combine with resources from other contexts to boost or compensate in the socialization of children and youth.
Parents are their children’s first teachers, and the resources they use at home have important implications for child well-being. An important early resource is the sheer quantity of verbal interaction children experience with adults. In a U.S study, Hart and Risley (1995) find that there is considerable variation by social class in the quantity of words and types of sentences that very young children experience. Children in welfare households experience less verbal interaction with adults than do children in working-class households; children who have professional parents experience even more verbal interaction than working-class children. Also, children in professional households are exposed to more complex sentences and questions that encourage their verbal responsiveness, while children in welfare households experience simpler sentences and more frequent direct commands. These differences are associated with predictable differences in children’s verbal capabilities by age 3. Thus, parents’ verbal interactions with children are a form of investment that has implications for children’s verbal facility several years later.
Researchers in the United States have also demonstrated that other dimensions of children’s home environments are consequential for their future well-being (Bradley and Caldwell, 1987). Children are advantaged when their home environments are reasonably clean, uncluttered, and free of obvious hazards and when parents express verbal affection, introduce children to visitors, speak pleasantly to them, and typically avoid physical punishment and harsh verbal rebukes. Children also are advantaged when their homes contain age-appropriate intellectual resources that can encourage cognitive development. For the youngest children, resources would include age-appropriate books and toys, and someone who reads to them. For older children, key resources would include being encouraged to pursue hobbies or create collections. For children 10 years of age and older, an additional relevant resource is whether children manage their own time. A combination of a safe home, a warm affective environment, and a stimulating cognitive environment constitutes a better home environment, which is a strong predictor of both child academic success and positive child social behavior (Parcel and Menaghan, 1994b).
Children with more educated mothers and with mothers whose jobs have more autonomy and complexity will also experience stronger home environments (Parcel and Menaghan, 1994b). Although some have argued that better home environments may not be strongly associated with parental financial resources (Bradley et al., 1989), some of the markers of cognitive enrichment, which we associate with cultural capital, such as music lessons or visiting museums, require household funds. More recently Schaub (2010) argues that US households of varying financial means are reading to their young children, while earlier such enrichment was associated with higher levels of social class. Children who have access to computers at home may experience an educational advantage over those who do not (Espinosa et al., 2006).
Sociologists have studied the relationship between parental social class and child socialization practices. Kohn (1977) and Kohn and Schooler (1982) link occupational working conditions and adult psychological functioning by arguing that the working conditions parents face on the job influence their child-rearing values. Blue-collar work tends to be standardized and is often closely supervised, while white-collar work often involves use and/or manipulation of symbols or ideas, as well as interpersonal interaction; it may be complex and is often performed under indirect supervision, permitting greater autonomy and self-direction. The values parents use in socializing children reflect these occupational conditions, with parents implicitly assuming that their children will inherit the types of jobs the parents occupy. As a result, white-collar parents emphasize self-direction and internalization of norms for their children, while blue-collar parents stress conformity to externally imposed rules. In addition, blue-collar work, which is routinized, low in autonomy, and provides little opportunity for creative thought, will erode intellectual flexibility and promote psychological distress, which in turn promotes less attentive and responsive parenting. The more intellectually complex work that white-collar parents perform can act as a positive resource for children, because it encourages parents to set high expectations for child self-direction and intellectual flexibility, qualities that children can use to further their own educational and socioeconomic outcomes as they mature. Parcel and Menaghan (1994a, b) provide direct empirical evidence for these ideas using longitudinal data that link parental working conditions to children’s home environments, as well as to child cognition and social adjustment. Interestingly, Kohn (1989) also develops his ideas referencing cross-national data.
Annette Lareau’s (2011) work reinforces the connection between social class and differentiated childhood socialization. Using in-depth case studies of 12 nine- and 10-year-old US children and their families, she finds that middle-class children are advantaged because their parents engage in concerted cultivation. These parents identify their children’s special talents and abilities and encourage their children to develop them. Also, they use language instrumentally in order to foster their children’s abilities to articulate their opinions, to make special requests of figures in positions of power, and to effectively challenge authority when individual needs are not being met. These parents intervene to ensure that their children are able to maximize their opportunities in ways that would best prepare them for the future (e.g., enrolling them in prep courses for standardized college admission tests, encouraging rigorous curricula, etc.). Her 10-year follow-up shows that the children who received the most deliberate cultivation from their parents went on to have positive educational and occupational experiences, as they had internalized important middle-class values and skills, such as time management, competition, and cooperation, and had become comfortable with performance-based evaluations.
In contrast, lower-income parents provide fewer of these adult-led extracurricular opportunities and instead encourage free play and relationships with extended family members, which Lareau terms the accomplishment of natural growth. These children develop fewer skills in dealing with adults outside the family. This limits their ability to negotiate adult-led environments at school and outside the home generally. These working class and poor children had not accrued the same institutional advantages at the 10-year follow-up. It is notable that Lareau (2011) finds strong continuity in the differentiated parenting practices across time, so that early advantage and disadvantage are amplified 10 years later. While the small numbers of cases precludes making definitive causal inferences, these findings are highly suggestive of social class differentiation in parental investment strategies and imply that such differentiation has long-term consequences. Her scholarship has been very influential, in part because she was able to differentiate race from class in parenting practices. For example, both black and white middle-class parents practiced concerted cultivation.
At the same time, others provide contrasting evidence. Chin and Phillips (2004) study how several forms of capital affect children’s participation in organized summer activities. They find that class differences in participation are a function of differential financial resources, differences in parental knowledge about nurturing children’s interests, and differences in information about activity availability. Covay and Carbonaro (2010) find that working-class children do participate in more EAs than one might infer from Lareau. Similarly, Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram (2012) find overlap by social class in parental considerations regarding participation in structured activity that focus on keeping children active, socializing and fostering their personal development. However, they also find differences in that working-class parents are more concerned with ensuring child safety and social mobility. Middle-class parents are especially attuned to the fit between the child’s interests and the opportunities for participation. Overall, it seems unlikely that middle-class parents are indifferent to the role that such activities play in social mobility. These disagreements and differing emphases suggest this is a very fertile area for future research that has sparked the imagination of numerous sociologists.
Literature also suggests that the timing of parental work schedules can influence the ways in which parents invest in their children. A growing proportion of Americans are required to work evening, night, rotating, irregular, weekend, and split-shift work schedules, collectively referred to as nonstandard work schedules (Presser, 2000). Parents who work nonstandard schedules are likely to be absent during evening hours and weekends, when parents traditionally invest social and cultural capital in their children. These parents often miss eating meals together, helping with homework, and spending quality recreational time together; additionally, they may not be available to participate in events that researchers consider essential for concerted cultivation, such as parent–teacher conferences, child sporting events, and school ceremonies or recitals (Wight, Raley, and Bianchi, 2008).
In addition, nonstandard schedules may cause higher levels of adult stress (Perry-Jenkins et al., 2006), exhaustion (Wight, Raley, and Bianchi, 2008), and marital instability (Presser, 2000), which may limit positive and capital-rich interactions with their children. Nonstandard schedules are linked to complications in cognitive development among young children (Han, 2005), behavioral problems and academic disengagement among middle-stage children (Strazdins et al., 2004; Hsueh and Yoshikawa, 2007), and delinquency and psychological problems among adolescents (Han and Miller, 2009; Han, Miller, and Waldfogel, 2010).
Other research, however, suggests that nonstandard work schedules can actually enhance parents’ abilities to invest in their children. Some parents may deliberately juxtapose their work schedules to achieve tag-team parenting, in which work schedules are nonoverlapping and thus allow one parent to be available to the child at all times (Hattery, 2001). Such a strategy may be especially useful for covering the high-risk hours after school (Snyder and Sickmund, 1999) and for allowing parents to spend more one-on-one time with children, thus establishing stronger bonds (Wight, Raley, and Bianchi, 2008). Nonstandard schedules are not as likely to enhance parent–child interactions in single-parent families, however (Han and Waldfogel, 2007).
Parents can also influence children’s social and cultural capital via where they choose to live. Pettit and McLanahan (2003) find that although moving is disruptive for children, the less advantaged who move have difficulty establishing new social ties because of their initial disadvantages, whereas the more advantaged who move to middle-class neighborhoods experience only minor disruptive effects. Mouw (2006) notes that, given the tendency for individuals to place themselves in contexts with others who are socially similar, it can be difficult to untangle the effects of such selection from the capital investment itself; for example, DeLuca and Dayton (2009) find that moving to better neighborhoods does not translate into measurable and sustained gains in educational outcomes, perhaps because among families that do move, most characteristics of those families remain the same.
When parents choose where they and their children live, they are often simultaneously choosing the schools their children will attend (Logan, Minca, and Adar, 2012). Neighborhoods that are characterized by high levels of racial residential segregation will typically also have schools whose racial distributions reflect neighborhood characteristics. The same can be said for social class. Given the well-documented tendency for lower SES and minority schools to contain less favorable learning environments than higher SES and majority schools, residential choice may compound the advantage or disadvantage present in the neighborhood. In addition, Ream (2005) finds that household mobility may reduce the social capital that Mexican American adolescents build with peers, with negative implications for their academic achievement. College choice is consequential for older adolescents. Turley (2009) demonstrates that student locale has a substantial impact on where students decide to go to college. Thus, parental decisions regarding family location can have long-term consequences.
A key unanswered question concerns whether specific empirical indicators reflect parental investment in social capital, cultural capital, or both. For example, Bradley’s treatment of home environments includes items such as whether parents are reading to young children and whether older children have access to musical instruments in the home. While several researchers argue these reflect social capital, Yamamoto and Brinton (2010) use very similar items to reflect cultural capital. Concerns expressed by Kingston (2001) regarding how cultural capital is measured and by Furstenberg (2005) and Portes (2000) regarding social capital provide corroborating considerations. Clearly, differentiating cultural capital from social capital for very young children may not yield much benefit. At this stage of the life course, parents are the primary actors who invest all forms of capital in their children. As children reach adolescence, however, such differentiation may be more consequential. For older children, we need more research that takes as problematic whether given measures more closely align with what we consider to be some form of social capital (e.g., bonding or bridging); whether they more accurately reflect one of several conceptualizations of cultural capital; or whether they reflect both forms of capital. Such studies will be important precursors to determining whether social or cultural capital is more influential in predicting particular academic and social outcomes, or whether these effects vary in strength depending on particular conditions and child characteristics.
Second, we remain relatively ignorant of how combinations of social and cultural capital investment either exacerbate inequality or ameliorate it. Studies often neglect to test for the interactive effects of social and cultural capital with reference to academic and social adjustment (see Parcel, Dufur, and Zito, 2010 for one review). Thus, although scholars have argued that inequality among children is increasing, the mechanisms through which parental investment is implicated are poorly understood.
In addition, we understand relatively little regarding how parental investment in children may be changed. Furstenberg (2011) reviews evidence suggesting that lower SES parents may not easily alter their investment patterns to facilitate child educational outcomes, while collective interventions such as preschool education may be more successful. Where investment in children should take place for optimal effect is a question that forces us to consider whether parental transmission of capital is always sufficient, or whether such investment operates to selectively advantage those children who have access to more parental resources (Dufur, Parcel, and Troutman, 2013).
Finally, we need more systematic inquiry that allows us to compare how similar and different these parental investment processes are by culture. Some relevant studies focus on one society at a time, possibly owing to data limitations and the challenge of doing comparative work generally. However, we should seek opportunities to engage in research with comparable data sets across more than one society so that we can make sharper comparisons (Campbell and Parcel, 2010; Parcel, Campbell, and Zhong, 2012). Such studies will lend greater precision to our inferences and provide a firmer basis on which to understand the important patterns through which parents transmit social and cultural capital to their children.