Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A compelling new literature suggests that socio-emotional (or "non-cognitive") traits in children have a causal effect on adult socio-economic status. Policy-makers and practitioners, however, need to know (a) how important socio-emotional factors are to social (im)mobility at the population level, (b) precisely what aspects of socio-emotional health matter to adult outcomes, and (c) the extent to which the effects of socio-emotional factors are additional to, or work through, educational attainment. This paper's contribution is to fill these three knowledge gaps. The British Cohort Study uniquely enables analysis of the role in social mobility of validated measures of subjective emotional distress, low self-esteem and low self-efficacy, as well as parent and teacher-rated self-control and behavior problems from early childhood through adolescence. Together, childhood emotional health accounts for up to 30% of the ordinal intergenerational association between parent and child social class. Multinomial logistic models find that subjective low self-efficacy and self-esteem, as well as externalized problem behaviors, substantially decrease the probability of attaining or maintaining a higher social class. These marginal effects are only partially accounted for by educational attainment. The results indicate that childhood socio-emotional health is a substantively important mechanism in the intergenerational persistance of social class inequality.