Youth adversity, parental resources and educational attainment: Contrasting a resilience and a reproduction perspective

In this article, we combine insights from development psychology and educational sociology to investigate to what extent adverse youth experiences harm children’s educational attainment and how this impact varies with parents’ resources. Youth adversities as parental rejection, parental death and parental divorce are considered. We hypothesize that, on the one hand, youth adversity may hinder the intergenerational transmission of parents’ cultural resources. On the other hand, we expect that parents’ financial resources promote resilience in children and may buffer the possible impact of youth adversity. We test our hypotheses employing data from the Family Survey Dutch Population, covering 5,760 respondents. Our results suggest that all three adverse youth experiences harm children’s educational attainment. Furthermore, children who experience adversity, especially parental rejection, benefit less from their parents’ cultural resources. This supports the notion that youth adversity reduces the intergenerational reproduction of advantage. Altogether, our results emphasize the importance of a multidisciplinary theoretical approach to understand the heterogeneous consequences of adverse youth experiences for educational outcomes.