Parental Involvement, Summer Activities, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment

Several authors have speculated that differences in parental involvement across parents’ educational attainment may influence the intergenerational transmission of education; however, these literatures have yet to be formally integrated. We begin to fill this gap in the literature by estimating augmented intergenerational mobility models that include measures of parental involvement and children’s participation in “school like” summer activities using rich data from the Child and Young Adult Supplement to the National Longitudinal Survey (NLSY79). Adding parental involvement and summer activity measures to the vector of standard socioeconomic controls does not change the estimated intergenerational transmission of education coefficient. Participation in summer activities significantly influences children’s educational attainment, and the transmission of education operates at least partially through highly-educated mothers facilitating their children’s participation in stimulating summer activities.