The Intergenerational Transmission of Parental Reading Involvement: Evidence from the 1970 British Cohort Study

Parental reading involvement has a significant impact on many child outcomes, including linguistic skills, reading proficiency, cognitive skills, and attitudes towards reading. In cultural reproduction literature, reading behaviour is attributed to cultural knowledge or cultural capital reflecting attitudes and preferences beneficial in various ways for the reproduction of social advantages. In this paper, we link this scholarship to psychological research on intergenerational transmission of parenting behaviour, which shows that parents often replicate their parents’ parenting styles, such as harsh parenting, attachment, and father’s involvement. This replication occurs through two main mechanisms. The direct mechanism involves social learning and identification, in which parents model their behaviour after their parents. The indirect mechanism suggests that certain types of parenting (e.g., constructive parenting) improve academic skills, self-esteem, or peer relationships, increasing the likelihood that people will engage in similar parenting when they become parents themselves.

Given these psychological arguments and the continuous interest in determinants and outcomes of parental reading to/with their children, our paper asks (1) if parental reading to their children is transmitted across generations and (2) whether the intergenerational transmission of reading varies according to the socioeconomic status of generation 1 (parent’s parents)?

We use data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which tracks children born in 1970 throughout their lives. We use information from Wave 1975 when children were five years old and mothers reported the frequency with which they read to their child. Our dependent variable is from Wave 2004 when participants were 34 years old and those with children shared information about reading to their child. The data set also provides rich information on socioeconomic status and other relevant parent and child factors at several time points. Preliminary results indicate that there is a strong relationship between parental reading in one generation and the next.