In our paper we explore how people and families, faced with ascriptions to be the ‚migration other’, develop ways of dealing with social inequalities, asymmetrical gender relations and hegemonic racialised and gendered power structures. Our focus lies on how these ways of dealing are transmitted and/or transformed intergenerationally and within a family and how continuities, as well as modifications and disruptions in transmissions between mothers and daughters can be reconstructed.

The qualitative data for our paper – collected via group discussions with families and biographical interviews – is from a research project focusing on life strategies of families with a migration history in marginalized urban neighbourhoods in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In our theoretical approach, family members are seen as actively dealing and negotiating with societal circumstances and social meanings (Wacquant 2006). Their strategies are analysed, with regard to enabling and hindering contexts, which shape each person’s scope of possibilities (Holzkamp 1983). Our research project aims to transcend beyond the deficit-oriented perspective without neglecting the social and societal challenges families have to deal with (Riegel/Yildiz 2011).

We ask in which ways life strategies of mothers and daughters are connected, in which way connections to the other generation are made and how gender and generation contexts are made relevant. The transmissions, transformations and disruptions in the intergenerational mother- daughter-relationship and strategies connected to dealing with gender and generation will be analysed in their societal intersections and interplay with racialised and gendered power and inequality conditions.

In this work, we contribute to research on the reproduction of social inequality by emphasizing the relevance of psyche in class-specific socialization. Applying a Bourdieusian framework, we want to show that the reproduction of class structure passes through the fundamental layers of habitus. We will argue that socialization is not restricted to the direct transmission of material goods or the impartation of cultural practices, but involves the habitus itself, including its conscious and unconscious as well as its cognitive and preattentive elements. Using representative survey data from the German National Education Panel Study (NEPS), we empirically address the psychic dimension of habitus formation in adolescents as well as the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission. We apply multiple correspondence analysis to construct a ‘social space’ of adolescents (14-17 years old) including latent indicators of personality types. In order to address the role of parents’ capital endowment and, consequently, social class position, for adolescents’ habitus formation in general and the involved personality dimension in particular, we project parents’ demographics as supplementary variables in the space of adolescents. Our analysis will establish that social class of parents is not only relevant for their children’s manifest economic and cultural resources or their practices, knowledge and skills, but plays an important part in the conditions of the development of habitus, thus affecting what psychologists conventionally label as ‘personality’.

Parents play an important role for the occupational orientation of adolescents. Previous research has shown that children with supportive parents develop higher career goals and achieve a higher socio-economic status during their early career.

But despite changing paternal and maternal role-models, it can be assumed that the father’s influence on the occupational goals and outputs might be stronger than the mother’s because the interaction between the father and the child is often focused on such instrumental topics while the interaction with the mother covers a broader range of topics. In addition, it remained unclear, if the support takes a stronger effect in same-sex parent-child-dyads or in opposite-sex-dyads. To get a sophisticated picture of supportive parenting’s influence on a successful career entry, it is necessary to take both of these dyad-types into account.

To illuminate these intrafamilial mechanisms, we ask - based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) –how supportive behavior of fathers and mothers affects the socio-economic status (ISEI) of boys’ and girls’ first job. We use structural equation modeling in order to take into account if this effect is mediated by the respondent’s educational level.

Our results reveal that especially fathers’ support leads to a higher ISEI during the early career. For sons, we found a direct effect on the first job’s ISEI as well as an indirect effect that is mediated by the educational level. However for daughters, the indirect effect comes to light. For the influence of mothers’ supportive behavior we found no significant effect.

We study the influence of parents’ participation in active labour market programmes, such as training, job subsidies, or workfare, on their children’s successful entry into vocational training and employment at a later point in time. In this way, we hope to gain an understanding of whether parents’ programme participation contributes to avoiding an intergenerational transmission of unemployment. The focus is on recipients of means-tested unemployment benefits in Germany. We expect parents’ employment chances and economic situation to improve as a consequence of programme participation and therefore their ability to invest in their children’s education. Parents’ employment may also have a positive effect on children’s self-esteem and can improve their scholastic achievements in this manner as well. Parents’ participation particularly in longer-term programmes that involve a regular daily schedule might also contribute to improving children’s success in school, as well as in entering vocational training or employment, in as far as parents’ function as a role model is a factor. We use administrative data and focus on teenagers who were 14-17 years old when their parents participated in a programme. We draw comparable families from participant and non-participant groups using matching methods. Preliminary findings indicate significantly positive effects of parents’ participation in further vocational training on children’s apprenticeship chances in their early twenties, and negative effects on children’s unemployment and means-tested benefit receipt. Our analyses can contribute to understanding whether and which types of active labour market programmes have particularly long-term effects, improving the situation of the next generation as well.