ABSTRACT
Parental education is not the only variable that affects intergenerational relations. Other distal factors can also affect child development through proximal processes and features of the family environment. Children’s educational attainments can be affected by the number of siblings, the structure of the family, or the age of parents at first birth. These factors are distal in that, while they shape the experiences of children’s lives and so their educational outcomes, their influence is not immediate in an ecological sense. Rather, the impact of distal features on children’s development is mediated by the features and nature of the contexts experienced by the child already reviewed in Chapters 4 and 5.
