Beliefs About Social Mobility Across Childhood

Children in the United States face declining rates of upward social mobility, yet cultural narratives such as the American Dream persist, emphasizing that anyone can improve their circumstances while also distorting perceptions of opportunity and inequality. This article synthesizes emerging research on how children in the United States and China reason about social mobility. In early childhood, children view social status as malleable and recognize that opportunities for upward mobility are not equally accessible to all. With age, children increasingly explain disparities in upward mobility in terms of structural rather than individual factors and allocate resources to groups they view as less likely to experience mobility. Together, this research suggests that recognizing unequal opportunities for upward mobility is associated with behavior that rectifies, rather than perpetuates, inequality. We conclude by identifying key questions about how children’s beliefs and causal explanations about social mobility vary across social and cultural contexts, what experiences shape their emergence, and whether the expression or correlates of beliefs about social mobility change from childhood to adulthood.