Although success is defined in different ways by people, all have an innate desire to be successful. And while there is no telling whether one will be successful in life, experts suggest that there are certain factors that makes a person successful and the success clue lies in the parents. According to experts, parents who possess certain qualities have children who tend to be more successful later in life
One of the qualities parents of successful people have are the high expectations they set for their children and this is backed by research and statistics. Neal Halfon, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, and his colleagues surveyed children who were all born in 2001 and found that the expectations parents have for their kids greatly affect how they will fare well in schools. This is what psychologists call the Pygmalion effect where one person's expectation of the other becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another success clue is that most successful people have parents who got higher educational levels. Another study conducted by Sandra Tang, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, showed that those children who were born to teen moms are less likely to finish high school than those whose parents went to college. The study involved 14,000 children who entered kindergarten from 1998 to 2007.
A Harvard Business School research, on the other hand, gives this success clue: children who tend to be successful later in life have mothers who work outside the house or have a career. According to the study the daughters of of working mothers tend to have a supervisory positions and earn more money. Furthermore, sons who have working moms are also more likely to share in the household chores and participate in taking care of the kids. Professor Kathleen L. McGinn, author and lead researcher of the study, said that having a working mother has some effect on sons regarding the issue of gender inequality.
