Do Parents' Social Skills Influence Their Children's Sociability?

Abstract

This article uses the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to examine the effect of parents’ social skills on their children’s sociability. Similar to many other national surveys, this survey lacks detailed information on parents. To remedy this deficiency, we construct a measure of parents’ sociability skills based on their occupational characteristics extracted from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). Even after controlling for a variety of background characteristics, including cognitive skills, we find that the sociability relationships between fathers and sons and between mothers and daughters remain statistically significant. We find that the dollar value to the sons of a given increase in their fathers’ sociability is one-sixth of the value to the sons of the same standard-deviation increase in their fathers’ education.