Parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations: Prevalence, stability, and convergence over time

Life-course scholarship has documented the important role of educational aspirations in status attainment processes but has also revealed that parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. However, it is unclear how parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations evolve over time. Here, we examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across school grades 3–9 (ages 8–15), (2) their stability over time, and (3) whether converging aspirations tend to converge to parents’ or to children’s aspirations. We also investigate (4) whether parent-child mismatches in aspirations depend on the opportunities that a child is afforded in an education system that sorts pupils into distinct tracks, thus shaping educational trajectories and final educational attainment. We use data from two German National Educational Panel Study cohorts (“kindergarten cohort”: N=4,217; “5th grade cohort”: N=3,908). Findings indicate that in school grade 3, 30% of parent-child dyads have mismatching aspirations; this percentage shrinks to 14-22% across grades 4–9. Mismatching aspirations are relatively instable, indeed much less stable over time than matching aspirations. Among younger children, aspirations mostly converge to their parents’ aspirations. Among older children, aspirations tend to converge in both directions. We also find that parent-child mismatches in aspirations vary considerably according to the educational track that the child ends up attending in secondary school. We conclude that parents and children incorporate the educational opportunities afforded to the child into their aspirations; aspiration mismatches evolve over time and as a result of institutional influences.