The Impact of Mothers. Intergenerational Mobility in Sweden 1865-2015

Elien van Dongen, Lund University

Social mobility is often seen as a family level process where one parent’s social status affects children’s status attainment. Recent studies have challenged the conventional ‘dominant parent’ approach to studying intergenerational transmission in recent cohorts (Korupp, Ganzeboom & Van Der Lippe 2002; Beller 2009; Hout 2018; Thaning & Hällsten 2020). It is however not known how the role played by each parent in social mobility changed as the working and family life of both men and women changed dramatically with modernization and changing gender norms. We study how both fathers’ and mothers’ social status affect child status attainment in Sweden during the past two centuries. Does the impact of fathers and mothers change over time, for example between breadwinner-homemaker and dual-earner families and societies? We use historical and modern census and register data covering full child birth cohorts born 1865-1985 and their parents. We observe their occupational status every ten years historically and annually by the 2000s. We find substantial differences in the role of mothers and fathers by child sex, with mothers status being as important as fathers status for attainment of daughters born in Sweden since the 1960s. We find increasing mobility between cohorts born in the first half of the twentieth century when only studying father-child associations, but this is partly compensated for by decreasing mother-child mobility for the same period. Especially for sons we see ‘breadwinner effects’ until the 1960s: father-son associations are higher in families with non-working mothers. Associations in occupational status between working mothers and their children were somewhat smaller before 1950. More importantly, substantially fewer women worked in these early cohorts. Overall, the impact of mothers’ occupational status on children’s status attainment increased substantially over the last two centuries. Both parents must be included to study changes in social mobility over time.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 145. The Impact of Mothers, Neighborhoods and Disability on later-Life Outcomes