Socioeconomic status (SES)—indexed via parent educational attainment, parent occupation, and family income—is a powerful predictor of children’s developmental outcomes. Variations in these resources predict large academic disparities among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds that persist over the years of schooling, perpetuating educational inequalities across generations. In this article, we provide an overview of a model that has guided our approach to studying these influences, focusing particularly on parent educational attainment. Parents’ educational attainment typically drives their occupations and income and is often used interchangeably with SES in research. We posit that parent educational attainment provides a foundation that supports children’s academic success indirectly through parents’ beliefs about and expectations for their children, as well as through the cognitive stimulation that parents provide in and outside of the home environment. We then expand this model to consider the intergenerational contributions and dynamic transactions within families that are important considerations for informing potential avenues for intervention.

通过父母的受教育程度，父母的职业和家庭收入来衡量的社会经济地位（SES）是儿童发育结果的有力预测指标。这些资源的差异预示着不同社会经济背景的儿童之间的巨大学业差异，这些差异在学年中持续存在，并使各代人之间的教育不平等现象长期存在。在本文中，我们提供了一个模型的概述，该模型指导了我们研究这些影响的方法，尤其着重于父母的受教育程度。父母的学历通常会驱动他们的职业和收入，并经常与SES在研究中互换使用。我们认为，父母的受教育程度可以通过父母对孩子的信念和期望，以及父母在家庭环境中和外界提供的认知刺激，间接地支持孩子的学业成功。然后，我们扩展该模型，以考虑代际间的贡献和家庭内部的动态交易，这是告知潜在干预渠道的重要考虑因素。