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Children and Adolescents in Times of Crises in Europe pp 45–62Cite as

Insecure Right from the Start? Socialization Effects of Parental Self-Perceived Job Insecurity

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Part of the book series: Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research ((CHIR,volume 20))

Abstract

The paper studies whether and how parental self-perceived job insecurity induced by economic crisis influences the vocational development of their adolescent children. The analyses based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel revealed that adolescents whose parents were worried about their job stability are more pessimistic when asked to estimate their likelihood of being unemployed and their likelihood of being professionally successful and of getting ahead later in life. After controlling for sociodemographic factors of the parents and for the children’s previous success in school, which represents their objective opportunities on the labor market, the intergenerational effects of parental job loss worries remained significant in multivariate analyses. Irrespective of their actual labor market chances, it appears that the 17-year-olds whose parents were worried about their job stability were insecure right from the start about their future employment prospects. This finding suggests that there was a socialization effect of self-perceived job insecurity through which the parents’ job loss worries were transmitted to their children and shaped their adolescent children’s career expectations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This crossover effect must be distinguished from the so-called spillover effect, through which workplace experiences affect the family domain and vice versa (Mauno et al. 2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Christiane Lübke

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  1. Christiane Lübke
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Correspondence to Christiane Lübke .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Socialization Research and Centre for Prevention and Intervention in Childhood and Adolescence (CPI), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Marc Grimm

  2. Department for Socialization Research and Centre for Prevention and Intervention in Childhood and Adolescence (CPI), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Baris Ertugrul

  3. Department for Socialization Research and Centre for Prevention and Intervention in Childhood and Adolescence (CPI), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Ullrich Bauer

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Lübke, C. (2019). Insecure Right from the Start? Socialization Effects of Parental Self-Perceived Job Insecurity. In: Grimm, M., Ertugrul, B., Bauer, U. (eds) Children and Adolescents in Times of Crises in Europe. Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16331-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16331-0_4

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