Parental religiosity and children's educational attainment in the United States

This thesis examines a topic of perennial interest to sociologists: Are there secular consequences to religious behavior? Adopting an intergenerational status attainment model and using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997), I demonstrate that parental religiosity, as measured by frequency of religious service attendance. increases children's educational attainment, at least within the contemporary United States. A substantial portion of the educational advantage that religious parents provide their children appears to he due to them helping their children avoid risk behaviors that compete with educational progress, like substance abuse, delinquency and early sexual debut. Religious parents have higher educational expectations of their children and also appear to increase their children's intellectual ability, and both of these mechanisms contribute meaningfully to their children's scholastic achievement as well. Surprisingly, although religious parents both tend to promote higher levels of children's non-cognitive skills (like self-control and optimism) and are generally more involved in their children's daily lives, these mechanisms do riot appear to be very responsible for their children's higher educational chances. Lastly, I find that religious parents improve their children's educational chances by having them attend religious services themselves, thus internalizing scholastically-useful habits of heart and mind via religious socialization, but even if children are not religious, parental religiosity is still found to he an educational asset. Religious affiliation differences are generally not found or found to he minor, but the results are most robust for Catholics, Mainline Protestants and Conservative Protestants. Overall, parental religiosity deserves renewed attention as an important basis for inequality in the United States and perhaps beyond.