CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Monika Pompeo

Title: Children's Educational Attitudes and Career Aspirations: The Role of Parental Influences and Parenting Styles

Abstract: We study how children's preferences and parenting styles shape educational attitudes and career aspirations. Based on survey data from 1,091 respondents, we find that children aged 7-9 can distinguish between personal preferences and career requirements: while boys like math more than girls, both groups recognize its importance, and children systematically differentiate subjects' relevance across professions. Children exposed to authoritative parenting show better alignment between their own and their parents' evaluations of subject importance, and between their perceptions and actual job requirements, particularly for languages. These findings contribute to our understanding of how early educational attitudes and career aspirations are formed, with implications for educational policy and early career guidance.