Parental Influence on Educational Goals

Analysis of data collected from ninth- and twelfth-grade boys and their parents is directed toward determining whether parent-child agreement on goals can be accepted as evidence of parental influences. The analysis leads to the following conclusions: (1) Parent-child agreement cannot be viewed as a wholly spurious basis for imputing influence, although any simple agreement measure tends to overstate the amount of influence involved. (2) Agreement measures based on the child's report of the parent's goals lead to different outcomes than those based on the parent's own report. (3) The child's report of the parent's goal seems to reflect the child's projection of his own goals an criteria of goal-setting onto his parents. (4) The evidence of direct goal transmission from parent to child is stronger among the older boys, but a paternal influence in the form of the son's modeling his father appears to be stronger among the younger boys. No evidence was found to support the hypothesis that agreement on goals varies with the quality of the parent-child relationship.