The Importance of Intergenerational Education from Parents to Children

Parental education is more important than other kind of education because education begins at home and not somewhere else. Parents are the best teachers who always teach their children everything they must know about the world in which they live in. Parents are better teachers than the “real ones” because they unconditionally love their offspring. The home environment is an important setting for acquiring knowledge because children typically have opportunities at home to observe literacy activities of others, to engage in various activities with other people, and to benefit from direct teaching by family members.

Possibly due to the varying home literacy environment, children enter school with different levels of preparedness to benefit from educational experiences.

Parental education is the key of success in life because only your parents can teach you how to perceive and handle the world that surrounds you.  Only they can teach you how to tackle the problems that you encounter in life. Nevertheless, our parents are our role models. It is also believed that household assets are an important determinant of child’s developmental outcomes. Both parental education and assets affect child’s educational outcomes, there might be an interactive relationship between the two as they relate to child development. In other words, intergenerational transmission of education from parents to children may vary by level of household economic resources. Parents’ education affects the wellbeing of their children through a multitude of channels. Perhaps the most obvious is family income. Researchers have established a strong relationship between education and earnings.

Better-educated parents have higher incomes, an important determinant of well-being across all stages of life. Parents with higher incomes simply have more resources to invest in their children. Children who grow up in families with fewer financial constraints are better nourished. They live in wealthier neighborhoods which have better schools. They are healthier, and more importantly, their families have the resources to deal with poor health conditions that can have a negative impact on health in adulthood.

Indeed, many of the investments in children that a higher family income makes possible bring dividends in the form of a healthy and prosperous adulthood.

Family income, however, is just one of the many ways that better-educated parents contribute to the lives of their children. Better-educated parents invest more in the education and well-being of their children. Definitely; they are better able to understand and use health information for themselves and their children. Furthermore, expectations of higher income and better health make better-educated parents more future oriented, which may influence their life choices and the choices they make for their children. More importantly, children learn from the attitudes and behaviours of their parents, which are often informed by knowledge acquired through education. So, education influences not only economy, but also lifestyle choices, for example, decisions about marriage and family.

Many studies have demonstrated that the negative correlations between poverty and child achievement (Duncan & Brooks Gunn, 2000) are even stronger than those associated with ethnicity or gender. Chatterji (2006) found that although African American children did show significant gaps compared with Caucasian peers, even when other background characteristics were controlled, these initial reading gaps in kindergarten tend to be more associated with children’s poverty levels than with ethnicity or gender.

Oral language development research can perhaps shed light on these achievement gap differences. When language scores (receptive and expressive language measures) of children raised in poverty were compared to the general population, theyusually scored one standard deviation below the mean (Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2003; Fazio, Naremore, & Connell, 1996; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). However, even though researchers found that young children in poverty had language skills that were, on average, lower than the general population, the children’s cognitive abilities fell in the average or normal range (Locke, Ginsborg, & Peers, 2002).

These studies suggest that there is a difference in language scores for children reared in poverty versus children not reared in poverty. Children’s abilities to express their thoughts verbally and to understand verbal language tended to be higher when their parents had higher levels of education, income, literacy skills, and reported positive school experiences (Weigel, Martion, & Bennet, 2006). Overall, all the researches show that children from lower-educated families had less exposure to diverse vocabulary through their parents’ attention and talking than children from better-educated families. Children from better- educated parents had better vocabulary skills, which contributed to their academic success later on in their life.

In conclusion, the most important factor in a child’s education is parental involvement. Parental education is the key of success in life, because only parents can teach their children how to perceive the world that surrounds them and how to tackle the problems that they encounter in life.

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prof. Réka-Andrea Solidum

Colegiul Tehnic “Alesandru Papiu Ilarian”, Zalău (Salaj) , România
Profil iTeach: iteach.ro/profesor/reka.solidum

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