It’s no surprise that parents and teachers affect educational and life outcomes for kids. But the sources of significant influence on young people go beyond that, with research from Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, Jessica McCrory Calarco, and Grace Kao finding one surprising category: friends’ mothers.
Existing research showed the importance of the social capital offered by children’s and teens’ own families as well as that of their friends: “adolescents with high-achieving, more academically motivated, and better-behaved friends tend to do better in school,” while friends who engaged in more risky behaviors could increase a teen’s chances of doing the same. But friends’ mothers? That seems like a leap, and yet it’s what Cherng, Calarco, and Kao found.
The researchers used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which followed students for more than a decade, allowing them to track later outcomes against information kids and their parents provided starting in middle school or high school. The questions students were asked included the names of their friends, allowing the researchers to cross-reference the same-sex friend they named first, presumed to be their best friend, with that friend’s survey responses.
The result: teens whose best friend’s mother was college-educated were 60 percent more likely to complete college themselves. (It mattered much more if a teen’s own mother had a college degree, yielding 230 percent greater odds of completing college, but that’s less surprising.) The effect of a friend’s mom’s education held up even when controlling for the resources of the teens’ own families.
Family income had a similar, but smaller, effect: the friend’s family income would have to go up by $100,000 to produce the same effect as the friend’s mother having a four-year college degree or beyond.
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Cherng, Calarco, and Kao also did an analysis controlling for students’ college expectations expressed in the second wave of the survey, when they were close to making a college decision. They found that even in cases where the adolescent and their parents expected them to go to college, having a best friend whose mother had completed college still increased college completion by 44 percent, although the effects of the friend’s family having a higher income had disappeared.
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It’s unsurprising that students expecting to attend college might choose “resource-rich friends” and that this might explain some of the correlation between those friends’ resources and a teen going on to complete college. “Yet,” the researchers wrote, “even controlling for these expectations, we find that access to best friends’ middle-class cultural resources (though not their material ones) is still associated with significantly higher rates of college completion.”
One important conclusion, in addition to the startling importance of friends’ mothers, is that the divide between a friend’s material resources and their cultural ones suggests that “friendships are better equipped for sharing cultural resources than material ones.”
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