Abstract

Most studies on social integration of ethnic minorities focus on the role of segregation, intergroup threat and hostility. The role of parents and the values they try to convey has received much less attention. These may include ideas about the appropriate choice of friends and spouses. Previous studies have shown an impact of parental attitudes and contacts on the interethnic contacts of their school-aged children. But do adult children also reflect parental attitudes in their attitudes and social networking? Parental influence may begin to wane when children become older. This article investigates the influence of parents on their adult children's attitudes and interethnic social contacts. Based on a unique data-set with parent–child dyads from a random sample of Turkish minorities in France, Germany and the Netherlands, I test first, whether parents influence their adult children's attitudes and second, the extent to which the ethnic composition of the social circle of parents affects that of their children. Third, I study how parents' and children's attitudes relate to children's interethnic social contacts. I find that parental attitudes do not have a direct impact on the interethnic social contacts of their children, but that they affect them indirectly through children's attitudes towards intermarriage.