Children’s educational aspirations have been shown to be highly relevant for their educational trajectories and, therefore, researchers have tried to understand how and when these aspirations are formed. The influence of parental aspirations on the development of children’s aspirations has often been the focus of such investigations in previous studies. Going beyond these earlier approaches, we address the question of how children’s aspirations might be influential for their parent’s aspirations. We also investigate if it is children’s perception of parental aspirations or parent’s factual aspirations, which play a role in the formation of children’s aspirations. This article contributes to the literature, first, on a theoretical basis, by providing a reasoned and interdisciplinary framework about mutually dependent processes of aspiration formations within families. Second, an empirical contribution is given, using data from the German National Educational Panel Study and analyzing the aspirations of 4,511 children and their parents. Our cross-lagged panel models show that children and parents influence each other in their aspirations mutually over time, with children being affected by both, the parent’s factual aspirations and the children’s perception of those. We give empirical-driven guidelines for future research on aspiration formation.

中文翻译：

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孩子的愿望、他们对父母愿望的看法以及父母的实际愿望——深入了解一个相互依存的复杂世界

儿童的教育愿望已被证明与其教育轨迹高度相关，因此，研究人员试图了解这些愿望是如何以及何时形成的。父母的愿望对孩子愿望发展的影响往往是以往研究中此类调查的重点。除了这些早期的方法之外，我们还解决了孩子的愿望如何影响父母的愿望的问题。我们还调查了孩子对父母愿望的感知还是父母的实际愿望在孩子愿望的形成中发挥了作用。本文首先在理论基础上为文献做出了贡献，提供了一个关于家庭内部相互依赖的愿望形成过程的合理的跨学科框架。其次，使用德国国家教育小组研究的数据并分析 4,511 名儿童及其家长的愿望，给出了实证贡献。我们的交叉滞后面板模型表明，随着时间的推移，孩子和父母的愿望会相互影响，孩子会同时受到父母的实际愿望和孩子对这些愿望的看法的影响。我们为未来愿望形成的研究提供了实证驱动的指导方针。