Equal opportunities for every child, a utopia? The parents' salary scales, the neighbourhood in which you grow up, your parents' education all influence the 'developmental outcomes' of children. It affects family life, explained professor of family sociology Renske Keizer (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences) during the ‘Rotterdamlezing’ last week.
The theme of the lecture was ‘family matters', but it is also almost Renske's motto, she told Dutch newspaper NRC. She and her research group focus on family and child development. They pay special attention to fatherhood: “For a long time, academic literature was mainly concerned with the role of the mother in parenting. What role does the father play then? I wondered about that.”
Do fathers and mothers have an equal role in raising a child?
“For a long time, the idea was that fathers and mothers are very different. Fathers were seen as the bridge to the social outside world, mothers as the safe nest. Fathers were thought to play an important role in the behavioural and emotional regulation of their children, among other things through frolic behaviour. But previous research has been subject to various comments: is it really fathers versus mothers? Also, earlier research compared fathers and mothers from different families. For a clear picture of the differences and similarities between fathers and mothers, it is important to look within one and the same family. There are almost no differences between fathers and mothers in the relationship between their parenting behaviour and the development of a child. We do see that fathers are relatively less involved in the education of their children, and this difference is greatest for less educated fathers.”
What role does a family play when it comes to social inequality?
"The socio-economic status of the family in which the child grows up has become an increasingly important predictor of the child's developmental outcomes in recent decades," Renske notes. "Two mechanisms can be distinguished in this. On the one hand, parents with a higher income are more aware, but also more able, to invest in those activities and parenting behaviours that give the best result for a child in society. For example, they engage in tutoring for their child's homework, whereas this is a lot more difficult when you have to make ends meet. On the other hand, poverty creates financial stress, which has a mental impact on parents, and therefore also has a negative effect on parenting."
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Read the full article on NRC.nl (in Dutch).
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