Parents often make decisions for their children, mostly with the best intentions. However, our understanding of the consequences of parental interference is limited.
Children of self-employed parents often become self-employed later in life
So far, we know that parental influence and nurture help explain why children often choose the same or a very similar occupation as their parents. In addition, we are also well informed that children of self-employed parents often become self-employed later in life. Parents thus seem to be important role models for their children.
Why do children of self-employed parents become self-employed later in life?
Entrepreneurship runs in families, but why? Children learn from observation as well as through interaction with role models. A recent study in JBVI reveals that parental socialization has a significant impact on the entrepreneurial intentions of adolescents. However, our understanding of the transmission of entrepreneurship from parents to children is still in its infancy. Our paper aims to add another piece to the puzzle by examining whether self-employed parents more frequently interfere in their children’s issues by doing things for their children that they could do themselves, compared to employed parents.
Father-son and mother-daughter relationships differ
Our analysis is based on large-scale German household data, including more than 3,700 observations of children aged between 9 and 17 years. Our main interest is in interference, which we define to be evident when parents state that they do at least often do things for their children that they could do themselves for educational purposes. We, however, only define parental interference to be evident when children recognize that their parents at least often do things for them that they could do themselves.
On average, we find that self-employed parents do not socialize their children differently from paid employed parents by doing things for them that they could do themselves. However, this null effect is due to differences in parental interference in father-son and mother-daughter relationships. While self-employed mothers tend to interfere less frequently in their daughters’ affairs than paid employed mothers, self-employed fathers seem to interfere more frequently in their sons’ affairs than their paid employed counterparts.
Interference hampers the development of entrepreneurial skills
Parental interference exhibits a negative impact on the development of a son’s perceptions of entrepreneurial competencies. In fact, sons subject to parental interference exhibit significantly lower self-rated abilities when it comes to finding solutions for problems and are less able to deal with new things. Parental interference might thus have unintended consequences for entrepreneurship among sons. It remains open to further research whether the children develop the skills later in life. Moreover, future research about socialization in entrepreneurial households might help to explain the decline in interest in succession in family businesses in Germany and to identify ways to reverse this trend.
Does parenting lay the foundations for the lack of willing successors in family businesses?
Today, parents have developed a sense to protect their children, where a very special form of such parental behavior is the so-called ‘helicopter parenting’. Helicopter parents are excessively involved and overprotective, intervene to solve problems for their children, make decisions for them, and shield their children from challenges. Such parents may act with the best intentions, e.g., that the children grow up safe and successful. Although our study is not responsive to such extreme forms of parenting, one might ask whether some modern forms of ‘protective parenting’ or interference in children’s affairs actually lay the foundations for the lack of willing business successors in the family.
Read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352673425000575
Author bio
Stefan Schneck is researcher at the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung (IfM) Bonn. His research covers various aspects of applied economics at the intersection of entrepreneurship, labor economics, and economics of the household.
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