Educational Inequality and Family Relationships: Influences on Contact and Proximity

Abstract

In modern society, education has become a major element of stratification and differen tiation. This paper examines how educational differences across and within family relationships affect the content of the relationship, thereby focusing on proximity and contact between parents and adult children and between siblings. Hypotheses are developed about why education should matter, using theoretical arguments about preferences and constraints. The hypotheses are tested using a large new survey on family relationships in the Netherlands, the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study. Family relationships are pooled into one dataset which is analyzed using multilevel regression. The results show sharp but nonlinear educational effects on proximity and distance, although most of the educational effect on contact is indirect, via distance. Educational differences within family relationships lead to greater distances and less contact, confirming the classic mobility thesis, but the effects are generally weak and the effects on contact are indirect. Implications of the findings for the different theoretical perspectives on family relationships are discussed.

Personal and Household Caregiving from Adult Children to Parents and Social Stratification

“…A large literature supposes that working class individuals are more strongly motivated by feelings of obligation and that they have a stronger orientation towards extended family, whereas middle-class members give priority to the nuclear family (see Johnson et al, 2000 andKalmijn, 2006) i . But it is not clear if this distribution is the result of different orientations towards family values among social classes or, if it is the result of structural differences in the ability to offer help.…”

“…From the parents' perspective, affluent and higher educated parents can opt for buying services and keeping their privacy and autonomy from children, since higher educated individuals seem to be more oriented toward individual autonomy (Kalmijn, 2006). In addition, parents with higher education have lower levels of morbidity and longer life expectancy without incapacity than lower educated people (Guralnick et al, 1993;Reynolds et al, 1990); they also have less difficulty in managing access to health and social services (Rodriguez and Stoyanova, 2004;Sarasa, 2007).…”

“…Lye (1996) concludes from six intergenerational studies in the US that resource availability is a major determinant of parent-adult children exchanges, as middle class members tend to be more involved in emotional and material support than their working class counterparts, especially in regards to financial transfers ii . In Europe, there is some evidence in favour of a substitution of financial transfers for time transfers among individuals with higher levels of income (Attias-Donfut et al, 2005); in part, this has been explained by the fact that highly educated children do experience greater geographical mobility and reside further from their parents more frequently, but also in part because those higher educated children who have experienced upwards social mobility are more dissimilar from their parents in culture and preferences (Kalmijn, 2006).…”

“…This procedure allows us to measure both how the distance between intergenerational cultures affects children's solidarity with their parents (Kalmijn, 2006), and how it affects the impact of child's education iii , since the opportunity costs for the highest educated children may be mediated by social mobility. If upward mobility is detrimental to family solidarity, as it has been supposed by classical sociologists such as Durkheim and Parsons (Kulis, 1987), then the solidarity behaviour of the highest educated children will be low due to opportunity costs plus social distance from parents.…”

Intergenerational contact beyond the dyad: the role of the sibling network

“…First, to investigate differences among all dyads we used a continuous measure: Contact frequency is expressed as the number of times an adult child and his/her parent met in the past 12 months. For convenience of interpretation of our results, we constructed a continuous measure by recoding the variable in the following way: Daily contact (300), a few times a week (156), weekly (52), monthly (12), a few times (4), once (1) and not at all (0) (Kalmijn 2006). Secondly, to investigate differences within networks, we used a dichotomous measure: Whether (1) or not (0) the adult child in the dyad under study had fewer contacts with the parent than the network average.…”