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IntroductionBefore coronavirus disease (covid‐19), adolescents from a lower socioeconomic status (SES) background tend to have less positive future orientations, receive less parental support, and have a weaker sense of control than adolescents from a higher SES background. The covid‐19 pandemic has potentially increased the socioeconomic gaps in positive future orientations, parental support, and sense of control among adolescents who are currently in vocational education. As societies are aiming to return back to precovid norms, certain groups of adolescents might require more attention for ensuring a stable future than others.MethodsTwo‐wave questionnaire data of 689 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 17.8; 56% female) from the Youth Got Talent project was analyzed. Latent Change Score models are a relatively novel approach that allows two‐wave data to estimate associations between precovid predictor variables and changes in outcome variables from before to during covid‐19 (e.g., SES, positive future orientations, parental support, and sense of control). Analyses were preregistered.ResultsThe precovid socioeconomic differences in adolescent's positive future orientations and sense of control remained stable during covid‐19, whereas the socioeconomic difference in parental support decreased during covid‐19. A decline in parental support, an increase in sense of control, and more covid‐19 hardships were associated with an increase in future orientations.ConclusionThe covid‐19 situation has not substantially increased socioeconomic differences in positive future orientations and sense of control, but did decrease socioeconomic differences in parental support among adolescents. Short‐term policies should aim to facilitate parental support and positive future orientations to all adolescents who experienced a decline, while also long‐term focusing on the more consistent socioeconomic difference in sense of control among adolescents.

In this study, we investigated whether the intergenerational transmission of SES is mediated by parental and adolescents’ conflict behaviors, emotion regulation, and empathy. Longitudinal serial mediation analyses were performed on a subset of adolescents ( Mage = 13.03) and their parents from the RADAR cohort study ( N = 320, 52.2% boys) in the Netherlands. Results showed partial support for intergenerational transmission of SES, mostly between mothers and girls. However, no mediation effect was found, primarily because parental SES was mostly unrelated to parental conflict behaviors. Parental conflict behaviors did affect adolescent conflict behaviors, emotion regulation, and empathy, which in turn were associated with SES outcomes in young adulthood. This study nuances the proposition of the family stress model that parents from a lower SES background – as a result of economic stress – display less constructive and more destructive conflict behaviors.