Socialized into Knowing: Gender Differences in Children's Knowledge of Parental Backgrounds as Early Relational Labor Across 45 Nations

Abstract The preservation and transmission of family knowledge is gendered work. Drawing on feminist frameworks of kinkeeping and relational labor, this study investigates how gendered socialization shapes children's knowledge of their parents' educational attainment and country of birth. We tested two hypotheses: (1) the Gendered Socialization Hypothesis, positing that girls—socialized into relational labor roles from an early age—have more accurate knowledge of parental backgrounds than boys, and (2) the Mother Involvement Hypothesis, suggesting that mothers' greater role as family historians results in children having more accurate knowledge of their mother's than their father's background. Using data from over 200,000 children across 45 national samples from TIMSS, and over 160,000 adolescents across 20 national samples from PISA, we conducted meta-analyses of logistic regression results. Both hypotheses received robust support. Girls demonstrated significantly higher odds of accurate knowledge than boys regarding both parents' education and country of birth (ORs = 1.14–1.32). Children across diverse cultures exhibited greater knowledge of their mothers' backgrounds compared to their fathers' (ORs = 1.13–1.40). Both patterns showed remarkable cross-cultural consistency, with the Gendered Socialization Hypothesis supported in an estimated 89–99% of countries and the Mother Involvement Hypothesis in 77–87%. These findings reveal that the cognitive and relational work of tracking family information is unequally distributed by gender from middle childhood, with implications for understanding how gendered divisions of labor are reproduced across generations.