The Interplay of Children’s and Parents’ Networks in Shaping Each Other’s Social Worlds

As our social worlds remain divided by categories such as ethnicity, religion, and social class, attenuating social boundaries is paramount to creating equal opportunities and building cohesive societies. Segregated networks mark boundaries from childhood on and persist through adolescence and beyond.

Research stresses parents influence on childrens contacts, but it largely neglects that children also influence their parents contacts.

If we do not account for the interplay of childrens and parents networks, we may draw wrong conclusions about how segregation emerges and under which conditions it persists or diminishes.

Since younger generations are more diverse, we must understand whether children adopt their parents network structures or whether diversity in childrens social lives also diversifies the social worlds of their parents.My project aims to advance our knowledge of mutual intergenerational boundary-making by developing and testing a theory of how childparent networks co-evolve over time in educational settings with varying degrees of diversity.

I propose to collect an innovative panel dataset of childrens and parents networks for multiple cohorts from kindergarten to secondary school.

These unique data will allow me to rigorously examine how the interplay of childrens and parents networks affects boundaries in each others social worlds and how this varies by childrens age and diversity in educational settings.

By showing how children and parents shape each others social worlds, the project will provide decisive new insights into the (bi)directionality and conditions of the intergenerational reproduction of social boundaries.

This will change our understanding of segregation and break new ground in the interdisciplinary fields of intergroup relations, family studies, and network science.

The results of the project will create a firm scientific basis on which policymakers can develop measures to reduce boundaries between future generations.