I was talking in my last post about the gifts I felt I was able to give my children as an older parent. Now I've found a study published last year by sociologists who found a trend among older parents.
The study is titled Advancing Age, Advantaged Youth: Parental Age and the Transmission of Resources to Children. The authors found that parents 35 and older were more likely to pass on cultural, economic and social resources to their children. The study looked mostly at mothers but a supplemental analysis also found a similar effect corresponding to paternal age. The researchers were looking at such things as whether the children had taken musical or other cultural classes, if the parents had started saving for college, if they knew their children's friends and their parents, if they routinely do things with their children, and if they volunteer at school.
"What we found throughout this research is a remarkably consistent pattern that suggests that advancing age of mothers - and, as suggested by supplementary analyses, fathers - provides an advantage to youths," the authors conclude.
The authors caution against overreaching, that there may be areas not studied where younger parents would be better able to provide resources. One example they give is that it may be advantageous to have younger children in areas such as play, sports and other areas that require physical energy or stamina.
Thank you to Brian Powell of Indiana University, the lead author, who provided me with a reprint of the article. The abstract and citation are in the next comment.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Do children get more from older parents?
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Advancing Age,Advantaged Youth:
Parental Age and the Transmission of Resources to Children
Brian Powell, Indiana University
Lala Carr Steelman,University of South Carolina
Robert M. Carini,University of Louisville
Abstract
Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we identify parental age
as influential in the parental provision of economic resources, social capital and cultural
capital to adolescents, as well as in parental educational expectations for their children. At the
bivariate level, the relationship is curvilinear, suggesting that having comparatively young or
old parents is disadvantageous to teenagers, at least with regard to resource allocation.With
controls for socioeconomic background and family structure, however, the pattern typically
becomes positive and linear: as the age of the parent rises, so too does the transmission of
resources to adolescent offspring. These patterns hold for most economic, social and cultural
resources, although the pattern is strongest for economic ones and weakest – albeit still
significant – for more interactional ones. Although maternal age is the primary focus of this
article, supplementary analyses also confirm a generally positive relationship between
paternal age and parental resources. These results suggest that parental age may warrant
attention similar to that given to family structure, race and gender.
Social Forces, Volume 84, Number 3, March 2006
What else do many of them get?
http://how-old-is-too-old.blogspot.com/
Thank you for your interesting post!
I thought perhaps you may also find this related scientific study interesting to you:
Human Longevity and Parental Age at Conception
http://longevity-science.org/Parental_Age_2000.pdf
very interesting, thank you for sharing. I am going to make a seperate post because I think many readers may miss it because it's an old post.
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