Parental cultural socialization and educational attainment. Trend effects of traditional cultural capital and media involvement

•Employing retrospective information this study analyses trends effects of cultural capital measures on children’s educational attainment.•The relevance of traditional parental cultural capital for educational attainment diminishes over time.•Parental media involvement activities became more important for educational attainment.•Especially parental reading instruction and parents’ setting television restriction rules became increasingly more meaningful for children’s educational performance.

This article analyzes long-term developments in parental cultural socialization effects for children’s educational attainment. Retrospective information of 3.106 respondents from the Family Survey of the Dutch population are used to address questions on trends in the impact of traditional measures of parental cultural capital and the impact of parental media involvement activities. Foremost, our study highlights that the relevance of traditional parental cultural capital for children’s educational success in the Netherlands diminishes over time, while parental media involvement activities became more important. Over the past decades, especially parental reading instruction and parents’ setting television restriction rules became increasingly more meaningful for children’s educational performance.