The association between parent–child discrepancies in educational expectations and adolescents’ cognitive ability

Educational expectations play an important role in adolescents’ cognitive development and human capital accumulation. Using four waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022, this article examines how parental educational expectations, children’s own educational expectations, and parent–child educational expectation discrepancies relate to adolescents’ cognitive ability. We find that both parental and children’s own educational expectations are positively associated with cognitive ability. However, relative to aligned expectations, discrepancies in either direction, whether parental educational expectations exceed or fall below children’s expectations, are associated with significantly lower cognitive ability among adolescents. Mechanism analyses suggest that discrepancies in either direction are associated with more frequent parent–child conflict. Upward-biased discrepancies are associated with lower adolescent academic self-efficacy, whereas downward-biased discrepancies are associated with lower parental homework involvement. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that these negative associations are stronger among students in regular class tracks, students from low-income households, students with less-educated parents, and rural students. Further analysis suggests that consistently high and aligned expectations correspond to the highest cognitive ability. These findings highlight the potential importance of expectation alignment within families and suggest that disadvantaged rural and low-income groups may warrant particular attention in educational policy design.