Parental socioeconomic class and Young Britons' family expectations: do family structure and educational aspirations, during adolescence, mediate this relationship?

Lydia Palumbo , University of Turku
Ann M. Berrington, University of Southampton
Peter Eibich, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Since the mid-20th century, ideological and socioeconomic explanations have been raised to motivate the changes in young adults' partnership behaviours in Western countries, e.g. the increasing postponement and retreat from marriage, accompanied by the rise in alternative living arrangements than marriage, such as cohabitation and singlehood. Adopting lifelong cohabitation and singlehood, along with early partnership, was recently associated with paths of socioeconomic disadvantage and social exclusion. Researchers have carefully examined how individual socioeconomic circumstances shape differences in partnership behaviours. However, they have not equally focused on the mechanisms through which early-life conditions, especially parental socioeconomic status (SES), could influence young adults' lifelong expectations, thereby guiding their actions towards a specific behaviour well before its realisation. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society, we analyse whether the relationship between parental SES (occupational class) and young Britons' marriage, cohabitation, singlehood and marital age expectations, is mediated by family structure and educational aspirations during adolescence. Our results show that, compared to their advantaged counterparts, young Britons whose parents were in routine occupations or unemployed, during their adolescence, are more likely to expect lifelong cohabitation or singlehood than a life course with both partnerships. Using KHB decomposition, we find that living in a lone parent family significantly mediates the effect of parental occupational class on lifelong cohabitation but less singlehood expectations. Results still hold after controlling for household income, albeit less pronounced. Thereby, childhood family structure appears a potential vector of inequality in family patterns.

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 Presented in Session 50. Union formation