Exploring Intergenerational Effects of Education: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding Mothers’ Educational Pursuits and Their Young Children’s Development

The positive relationship between parental education and children’s educational outcomes is one of the most well established connections in the developmental literature. However, nearly all of this research treats parent education as static across a child’s development. Estimates from the 2008-2009 Survey of Income and Program Participation suggest that nearly 2 million low-income parents were engaged in some form of continued education that year. Given this, it is critical to understand parents’ experiences in school, as well as the relationship between child development and parent education, as the latter changes over time. In this two-study dissertation, drawing broadly from ecological theories of development, I used quantitative and qualitative methods with multiple datasets to explore the relationship between mothers’ attainment of additional education and their young children’s development. In Study 1, I used data from a national sample of low-income families with young children to test whether there is a relationship between the development of children’s cognitive skills between the ages of 3 and 7 and mothers’ attainment of additional education. Based on individual growth modeling analyses, I found a positive relationship between maternal educational attainment and children’s early writing and mathematics skills. In addition, children appeared to benefit more when their mothers attained additional education after children had transitioned to elementary school. For children’s mathematics skills only, the positive relationship between children’s growth trajectories and mothers’ attainment of additional education was largest in magnitude for children whose mothers had the lowest levels of education at baseline. In Study 2, I employed grounded-theory methods and longitudinal qualitative interviews from a different sample of low-income mothers (with preschool-aged children) to understand mothers’ motivation for pursuing additional education while raising a young child. I found that women’s motivation to pursue, or not to pursue, additional education was related to their caregiving responsibilities, and their personal goals, in contradictory and complementary ways. Specifically, the need to provide and care for their children simultaneously pushed mothers towards, and pulled them away from, additional schooling. However, women were also motivated to pursue schooling by their desire for intellectual growth and personal fulfillment. The extent to which women articulated these personal motivations may be related to their success in pursuing additional education