Socioeconomic status, parenting and conscientiousness: the unequal development of children's focus

Conscientiousness is one of the most relevant personality traits for success across the life course. According to recent studies, facets of Conscientiousness have different relevance in different contexts. One of these facets, Focus, has proved to be important in the context of learning and education, whereas the facet Orderliness has not. For this reason the development of specific facets has become a subject of inequality research. This study examines for the first time whether the development of a child's Focus is determined by the mother's personality and/or by SES by using longitudinal data following children from 2-3 to 5-6 years of age. Data for this study were obtained from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Evidence from estimating autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation models indicated that Focus is influenced by the mother's level of education, and that this influence is stronger than the effect of the mother's personality. In addition, the results showed that child-centered parenting practices mediate to a small extent the effect of maternal education on a child's Focus.