Parent-Adolescent Transmission of Socioeconomic Status: Testing Serial Mediation of Conflict Behaviors, Emotion Regulation, and Empathy

In this study, we investigated whether the intergenerational transmission of SES is mediated by parental and adolescents’ conflict behaviors, emotion regulation, and empathy. Longitudinal serial mediation analyses were performed on a subset of adolescents (Mage = 13.03) and their parents from the RADAR cohort study (N = 320, 52.2% boys) in the Netherlands. Results showed partial support for intergenerational transmission of SES, mostly between mothers and girls. However, no mediation effect was found, primarily because parental SES was mostly unrelated to parental conflict behaviors. Parental conflict behaviors did affect adolescent conflict behaviors, emotion regulation, and empathy, which in turn were associated with SES outcomes in young adulthood. This study nuances the proposition of the family stress model that parents from a lower SES background – as a result of economic stress – display less constructive and more destructive conflict behaviors.