By the Sweat of Your Parents’ Brow: Self-Sufficiency of Young Adults and Intergenerational Transmission of Values and Resources inHungary

Abstract

The chapter discusses the relationship between economic self-sufficiency of young adults and value transmission among three generations within the family in Hungary. It highlights both direct and indirect mechanisms of transmission of family- and work-related values, ranging from direct communication to setting an example or joint leisure-time activities within the family. We find that knowledge of languages greatly contributed to upward social mobility for our respondents; acquiring such form of cultural capital was also expected and highly rewarded by parents. Parenting styles can have strong effects: families where all three generations embraced autonomy and self-direction, the transmission of values and cultural capital was rather successful, whereas neglect, i.e. low levels of responsiveness, yielded outcomes where transmission of some values were perceived as failures by interviewed parents themselves. Our most important finding is that investment to education was a dominant strategy for our interviewed parents and grandparents, who also did their best to support their offspring start an independent life. We also note that the boundaries between self-employed and family-employed youth are often blurred because of the significance of parental support, which results in very few signs of self-sufficiency in the case of children of self-employed/family-employed families. Yet, notwithstanding the importance of family support, a significant share of young adults in Hungary actively pursue economic self-sufficiency, demonstrated by their quest for jobs, internships and the intrinsic demand for being able to economize, seen as the means to become independent from their parents.