Parent-Child Cultivation and Children’s Cognitive and Attitudinal Outcomes from a Longitudinal Perspective

Abstract

This work adopts the concept of “concerted cultivation” (Lareau A. American Sociological Review 67(5), 747–776, 2002, 2003) to interpret how socioeconomic differentials in child rearing practices generate unequal children’s outcomes, distinguishing between children’s participation in organized leisure activities and children’s engagement in cognitively stimulating activities. Results show that it is the engagement in cognitively stimulating activities and not the participation in organized activities more generally that enhances children’s reading ability and the locus of control. Path analyses confirm that the selected dimensions of parent-child cultivation—parental expectations, direct stimulation, parental interactions with the school and children’s engagement in cognitively stimulating activities—mediate more than half of the socioeconomic gradient in children’s reading ability and the locus of control, even after controlling for the previous level of abilities. In addiction, the effect of parent-child cultivation is largely independent from and stronger than parental socioeconomic characteristics. The model is assessed on a large cohort sample (British Cohort Study 1970).