2.3. Parents’ financial experience
Significant family members, especially parents, present incomparable socialization influences
on young adults’ learning processes (Xiao et al., 2011). By interacting with parents,
children develop consumer skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Even as they enter early
adulthood, parental influence remains a potentially important socializing force (Bowen,
2002; Norvilitis and MacLean, 2010; Shim et al., 2013). In a survey of 924 students enrolled
at various universities, 74% of women and 68% of men stated that they obtained their
personal finance knowledge from their parents (Chen and Volpe, 2002). Furthermore,
findings from the 2001 Parents, Youth, and Money survey suggest that parents who think
they do an “excellent” or “good” job managing their money are more likely to provide their
children with financial guidance than those parents who think they do a “fair” or “poor” job
managing their money (Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2001). Therefore, we expect
financially experienced parents to be more capable of helping their children. We hypothesize
that parents’ financial experience positively influences youth financial knowledge and could
help to narrow the gap in financial knowledge when financial education at school is not
available. This leads us to our final hypotheses: