Women who attain more education tend to have children with more educational opportunities, a transmission of educational advantages across generations that is embedded in the larger structures of families’ societies. Investigating such country-level variation with a life-course model, this study estimated associations of mothers’ educational attainment with their young children’s enrollment in early childhood education and engagement in cognitively stimulating activities in a pooled sample of 36,400 children (n = 17,900 girls, 18,500 boys) drawn from nationally representative data sets from Australia, Ireland, U.K., and U.S. Results showed that having a mother with a college degree generally differentiated young children on these two outcomes more in the U.S., potentially reflecting processes related to strong relative advantage (i.e., maternal education matters more in populations with lower rates of women’s educational attainment) and weak contingent protection (i.e., it matters more in societies with less policy investment in families).

受过更多教育的妇女往往会给孩子提供更多受教育的机会，这是一代又一代人的教育优势的传播，这种优势已经植根于更大的家庭社会结构中。调查与生命过程模型这样的国家级别的变化，这项研究估计母亲受教育程度的关联带着他们的小孩在儿童早期教育和参与36,400儿童的合并样本中认知刺激的活动报名（ñ =来自澳大利亚，爱尔兰，英国和美国的具有全国代表性的数据集中的17,900名女孩，18,500名男孩）结果表明，拥有大学学位的母亲通常在美国对这两个结果的差异更大，这可能反映了与相对优势强（即，对妇女教育程度较低的人群而言，产妇教育的重要性更大）和对特遣队的保护较弱（即，对家庭的政策投资较少的社会，其重要性更大）。