The Effects of Parents’ Lifestyle on Their Children’s Status Attainment and Lifestyle in the Netherlands

Abstract

According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, parents transmit the taste patterns and lifestyle of their social status group to their children. These taste patterns and lifestyles are assumed to support or to frustrate them in their career and in the maintenance of their social position in their further life course. Therefore, the lifestyle of the parents would strongly contribute to the persistence of social inequality. In this paper, we examine to what extent parents have affected the status attainment of their adult children through the cultural and economic dimensions of their lifestyle when their child was growing up, and to what extent they actually have passed their lifestyle on to their adult children. We also examine whether the reproduction process occurs more strongly in the cultural or in the economic dimension of social stratification. The data, collected in 2000, refer to a sample of 399 young Dutch adults aged between 20 and 40 who have been interviewed on a broad range of lifestyle characteristics derived from Bourdieu’s book ‘Distinction’. Also their parents have reported independently on the lifestyle in the parental family at the time their child was around 12 years of age. The data on both parents and their grown-up children offer a unique opportunity to study the role of lifestyles in the intergenerational reproduction of social inequalities. We conclude that parents pass their lifestyle on to their children. Children who were raised with a more cultural lifestyle have, as adults, a more cultural lifestyle themselves, and those who were raised with a more economic lifestyle have more economic lifestyle in their adult life. We also find that both the cultural and the economic dimensions of the parents’ lifestyle lead to advantages in education, occupation and income of their adult children. As such, the cultural and economic lifestyle of the parents is one mechanism by which parents pass on their social status position to their children. We also find some indications that in the intergenerational transmission of social status the cultural status dimension is more important than the economic dimension.