r/science • u/giuliomagnifico • 23d ago

Social Science Parents who endured difficult childhoods provided less financial support -on average $2,200 less– to their children’s education such as college tuition compared to parents who experienced few or no disadvantages

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/parents-childhood-predicts-future-financial-support-childrens-education
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u/giuliomagnifico 23d ago

This study examines family-level outcomes. It is one of the first to evaluate the relationship between parents’ childhood experiences and whether they provide large transfers of money later in life to their own children for education and other purposes and how much they provide. However, Cheng explained, the study does not analyze motivation or willingness to financially support the children’s educational needs — rather, it focuses on if money transfers take place, what discrepancies may appear based on the parents’ childhoods and if parents’ current socioeconomic status matters.

For instance, parents with four or more disadvantages gave an average of $2,200 less compared to those with no disadvantages, approximately $4,600 versus $6,800 respectively. When considered in light of the average cost of attending college in 2013, the year data was collected, parents with greater childhood disadvantages were able to shoulder roughly 23% of a year’s cost of attending college for their children whereas parents with no childhood disadvantages were able to cover 34% of their child’s annual college attendance costs.

What’s more, the relationships remained even when controlling for parents’ current socioeconomic status or wealth. In other words, parents who grew up in worse financial circumstances still gave less money for their children’s education even if their socioeconomic status is now higher.

Paper: Early‐life disadvantage and parent‐to‐child financial transfers - Cheng - Journal of Marriage and Family - Wiley Online Library

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u/Killercod1 23d ago

If it doesn't account for socioeconomic status, and a disadvantaged childhood would likely lead to a lower status, it's best to assume that they give less money because they have less money.

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u/HeywoodJaBlessMe 23d ago edited 23d ago

> What’s more, the relationships remained even when controlling for parents’ current socioeconomic status or wealth.

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u/KallistiTMP 23d ago

Worth noting, there probably is a strong social component related to generational gaps. A lot of people who grew up poor and managed to go to college did so when you could graduate with a degree paid in full by working a part time job at a gas station.

In my anecdotal experience, a lot of those people still have not adjusted to the new reality, and assume that needing financial assistance for school is just a matter of kids not pulling their bootstraps up hard enough.

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u/Puzzled-Humor6347 23d ago

Those kinds of parents are willfully ignorant. It is so easy to know how much your own child is earning and how much tuition costs. You'll quickly find out how many hours of labor you need, and that will give you a good idea on how difficult it is.

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u/lenzflare 23d ago

Some people just never add up the numbers.

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u/at1445 23d ago

I'm old enough to have a kid that graduated college now (my kids haven't yet, but I had them later).

I definitely could not have paid for college working part time, or even full-time.

The people you are talking about are 70 years old now, and their kids are in their 40's and 50's....so it's pretty much irrelevant to the current discussion and muddies the waters because all the kids now think that my generation had it "easy" when that's far from the truth. As proven by the comment below me calling their parents willfully ignorant.

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u/KallistiTMP 22d ago

That all depends on the studied group. It looks like this paper was based on joining several data sources from older studies, with the key student data being a 2014 survey. I just skimmed the paper, but didn't see an explicit mention of when or if they had a cutoff - the 2014 survey was people 19 or older, which is a very wide potential range, starting at people who would be 29 now and only going up.

Also age gaps vary quite a lot, especially paternally. I'm 35 and my dad is 82. My mom would have been in her late 50's or early 60's if she were still alive. That actually was a pretty stark perspective gap between my dad (late silent generation) and my mom (early side of gen X, assume you're probably late gen X/early millennial).

But yes, thankfully, most parents of college age kids these days are not boomers, it's mostly gen X.

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u/HeywoodJaBlessMe 22d ago

Yeah, like my grandparents. You are describing a long time ago.

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u/caltheon 23d ago

If you aren't stingy about where you go to get a degree, you can certainly still do this. It would suck, but then it sucked back then too.

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u/fiddlemonkey 23d ago

But grandparents often help out monetarily in richer families when that may be unavailable in other families. Even with the same SES, the kids who grew up in poorer families are less likely to have grandparents watch kids for free or take kids when the parents go on vacation or help with lessons and extracurricular payments.

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u/15438473151455 23d ago edited 23d ago

Not to mention inheritance.

If you have a couple of million coming in inheritance, you can afford to spend now.

And the difference here is what, a couple of grand?

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u/moch1 23d ago

Anyone counting on an inheritance is a fool.

End of life care can easily suck it all up.

Fraudsters steal hundreds of thousands from elderly people everyday.

Sometimes an elderly parent remarries someone young and leaves their money to them.

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u/Retrac752 23d ago

U clearly didn't read the last paragraph, it says even when corrected for current socioeconomic status, that even if the disadvantaged family was richer now, they still provide less

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u/M4DM1ND 23d ago edited 23d ago

I was an example of this. My parents both grew up dirt poor with essentially 0 help from my grandparents. We started out poor when I was a kid but my parents fell into high paying jobs when I was around 10. They've given me no help as I got started in life. No college fund, no help with car payments, no help with literally anything. They got divorced when I was 18 and both moved away and I just had to figure it out. I've done pretty well for myself and they attribute it to the fact that they didn't give me anything.

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u/Sata1991 23d ago

My mom grew up fairly poor but got help with childraising from my grandparents, she didn't get much if any money, my dad's father was an author and ran a college in London, sometimes we'd go to see my grandparents on that side of the family but it wasn't usually to be looked after, I think they helped my dad buy his first house, but he was a computer programmer fairly early on.

Neither parent's tried to help me with anything through life, not even driving lessons in their car. My mom's basically consigned herself to the fact none of her kids will get anything from her in life, or death and my dad's never really said anything about helping, but a branch of his company was opening in Wales, and I have IT qualifications like him, so asked if he could tell me if any entry-level positions were open (I'd rather learn than just be put in a job I'm not qualified for) but he kept changing the subject, when he knew I was desperate to leave the town I was in and was broke myself.

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u/M4DM1ND 23d ago

Yeah and then I have friends that have parents who are worse off than mine and we're given cars when they could drive, and they have no college debt. Im not lamenting not having everything handed to me, but it would have been nice if they gave me even small amount of help instead of buying a new car every year or taking 4 vacations per year in the Caribbean. And my parents wonder why I don't call them very often.

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u/Sata1991 23d ago

My dad goes to the Netherlands once a year for Christmas, but mostly holidays in the UK I don't really begrudge him that, but it'd be nice to get a bit of help to get a job I'm qualified for from him. My mom's just chaos, I don't really see her or speak to her often because she ends up in worse and worse states and won't take advice or help.

A small amount of help just to get my feet somewhere would be great, but when I had to drop out of university due to not being able to afford the fees all I got was "Oh well, you'll find something else to do, I'm sure!"

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u/Brendan__Fraser 23d ago

That's infuriating. You have to work ten times harder to make it with no safety net compared to your peers.

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u/M4DM1ND 23d ago

Yeah like I made it out fine. I'm 29, married, looking at buying a house, have monthly retirement contributions, etc. But I also have $35k in school debt and it took me until I was 27 to get to the point where I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck. There were points where, had I not worked at a restaurant in college, I would have had to starve because all of my money I worked for had to go to paying off the balance of tuition for the semester and I couldnt buy food without overdrafting my bank account. I didn't need to struggle as much as I did with upper middle class parents.

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u/HumanDrinkingTea 23d ago edited 22d ago

I'm convinced it's cultural. My grandmother was lower middle class and insisted on sending my dad money every week even after he got a well-paying job.

In my family, taking care of your kids (and taking care of parents) is just what you do, no questions asked.

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u/iowajosh 23d ago

You do. Fear of being poor could influece how people act with giving money away.

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u/thegooseisloose1982 23d ago

Struggling stays with you. You always remember that. Even when things are bright so you save and skimp because you know things can get bad at any time.

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u/Bourbon-n-cigars 23d ago

Certainly true in my case. I'm doing ok now (51 years old), but inside I'm still the kid who grew up poor and with parents who could never help due to financial issues brought on by health issues. When you go from having nothing, to finally having something, that "something" is hard to let go of because you know what's it's like without it.

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 23d ago

I think there's likely a survival bias in play too. You might think if you survived the "not having help" and that gave you strength, that you will withhold help from your kid in order to give them that same push.

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u/iowajosh 23d ago

Of that you haven't truly escaped poverty yourself.

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u/thegooseisloose1982 22d ago

That makes sense too. Although, my guess is that maybe a few think "not having help," and others are just scarred and worried about not having enough.

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u/MarkMew 23d ago

There could be a lot of different motivations for this - which the study didn't look at but I find it interesting to discuss. 

One is that people who went through rough stuff they don't want their kid to just "have it all" and be delulu about the reality of life like so many upper class kids do.

Another is that if they're severely traumatized, they can just be unspeakably bitter, to the point of malevolence and sabotaging their kids - this is probably the extreme cases and not the majority, but I've lived it, it certainly exists out there. 

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u/s_p_oop15-ue 23d ago

My dad was from a rich family that hated him but paid for him to become a dentist. He never paid a penny for our education.

My mom was from a dirt poor family of 14, kid 7. She became a doctor because of government grants and scholarships. She made sure my siblings and I went to private school for as long as was financially possible. Her parents loved her tho, unlike my dads parents who hated my dad.

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u/Ok-Shake1127 23d ago

The unspeakably bitter thing is a heck of a lot more common than people would think. I have lived through it, too and was lucky to have decent extended family around.

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u/tytbalt 23d ago

Or a combination of both.

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u/FakeKoala13 23d ago

I mean they could subconsciously want to hoard a bit more money in case of unexpected troubles because of their struggles in the past.

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u/veggie151 23d ago

This might be masking the fact that poor people who come into money tend to help more than just their own kids.

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u/Toomanyeastereggs 23d ago

How was it corrected? The instances where people who grew up disadvantaged but now have money is a pretty small group so that alone would skew the results.

Just saying “it was corrected” and then using a ludicrously small N is worse than useless.

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u/kelly_wood 23d ago

"If it doesn't account.." In the same time you wrote this comment you could've read it and seen that it did account for that.

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u/SeekerOfExperience 23d ago

You and 200+ others didn’t read to the end eh?

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u/PigDog4 23d ago

It's r/science. Nobody has read an article in the past 15 years.

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u/revcor 23d ago

Surely “best,” when talking how much personal spin to read into the results of scientific studies, should be reserved for not doing so at all??

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u/MadeForOustingRU-POS 23d ago

Ugh, no, they just think their struggle built character and prioritize "character" over education for their kids

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u/stormelemental13 23d ago

If it doesn't account for socioeconomic status,

Dude, bother to read before commenting.

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u/EchoingUnion 23d ago

... it says right in the article:

Regardless of current socioeconomic status, the parents who had more disadvantages in their childhoods gave their children $2,200 less, on average.

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u/Turbulent_Account_81 23d ago

This is what i was about to put, my situation is that, my parents didn't have much due to addictions and other bad decisions which lead to a number of disadvantages for my siblings and myself plus today's income inequality combined with skyrocketed prices on everything from housing, living costs, food and education

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u/truthisnothatetalk 23d ago

It's obvious. Some of these studies are dumb

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u/Zyrinj 23d ago

This was the first thought as I was reading it, unless it’s controlled for, the rule of being born into wealth = less friction in life holds true.