Does parents educational attainment affect students performance?

Answer 1

Parents affect educational attainment because if there is no support for the child, both emotionally and financially, the child would not have the passion to complete their education. Also, the background of the parents can affect attainment as well due to their socioeconomic status. That is why most low income families experience their first college at the 3rd or 4th generation.

Answer 2

A parent's educational attainment may impact their child's performance in several ways:

Parental example: Children often emulate their parents. Children of parents who did well accadmically and/or went on to college may do better bcause they are trying to be like their parents. Children of parents who did poorly or dropped out may follow in their parents footsteps.

Parental attitude: Parents who did poorly in school may have lower standards for their own children because their own standards were low. If a parent did poorly or got less education because they didn't value education, they may pass that attitude along to their children. Conversely, parents who did well in school or got advanced degrees may have higher standards for their own children. If a parent did well or got a lot of education because they valued education, they may pass that positive attitude along to their children.

Parental assistance: Parents who are well educated may be better equiped to assist their own children because the understand the concepts their children are studying better than poorly educated parents.

Parental availability: Better educated parents tend to be able to get better jobs which may mean more freedom to spend time with their children to help them with school. Parents who are working long hours, two jobs, etc. just to make ends meet have less time to spend with their children.

Teacher expectations: Teachers can (either conciously or unconsciously) project the parents achievements onto their offspring - expecting children of accademically accomplished parents to do better and children of accademically deficient parents to do worse - which can influence what they expect from the children and influencing the children to live up to or down to the expectations.

Parental affluence: Parents who did well academically tend to get better paying jobs, which leads to more resources to help the children.

Indirect peer pressure: Parents who did well academically tend to gravitate in social context to other parents who did well academically. This leads to children being exposed to other children who are subject to all the positive influences previously listed. Parents who want their children to do well will also seek to influence who their children hang out with - steering them towards other children who value education. On the flip side, parents who did poorly in school are less likely to provide these positive influences to their children because they are more likely to settle in areas where the rest of the people are less academically accomplished, giving their children fewer nearby peers who may provide positive peer pressure to do well. Very poor people tend to get stuck in areas with other poor people which means they are more likely to get stuck in areas with higher crime rates, drug problems, and other types of social dysfunction (people engaged in crime, doing drugs, etc are much more likely to be poor so the rest of the poor people get stuck dealing with them more on a day-to-day basis than more affluent people).