ABSTRACT
In this book, we have described a great number of interrelationships between factors that influence education and social outcomes for children. In particular, we described some of the most recent quantitative evidence suggesting that the education of the parents can have substantial effects on children’s educational attainment. We proposed a theoretical framework based on the ecological model of developmental psychology to understand how children live in multiple and multi-layered contexts and how the education of their parents can impact upon parent-child interactions (proximal processes) and provision of wide-ranging resources (internal characteristics of the family environment), as well as other more distal factors such as family formation, income and employment. It is in this way that factors or circumstances associated with deprivation and disadvantage affect the way in which a child develops, and therefore reproduce inequalities across the generations.
