Žan Lep

The study examined an intergenerational model of financial socialization and its outcomes that connects parents’ and their children’s self-perceived financial learning outcomes to satisfaction with financial management and parent-child financial relationships. The conceptual model was based on models of financial socialization processes contributing to healthy financial development of emerging adult students (Shim et al., 2010; Sirsch et al., 2020), but extended the links across two generations within the same family. Considering perspectives of both generations in a single model, it was tested in a sample of 482 pairs of Slovenian first-year university students and one of their parents. Structural equation modeling revealed that parental healthy financial learning outcomes (knowledge, behavioral control, behavior) shaped their children’s positive financial development (financial learning outcomes and satisfaction) and promoted the parents’ satisfaction with financial management. In turn, both the students’ and the parents’ financial management satisfaction positively predicted a joint measure of satisfaction with parent-child financial relationship. Similar links of financial learning outcomes to satisfaction with financial management and parent-child financial relationships were observed for both generations, even though parents and their children were financially socialized under different socioeconomic conditions.

This study employed the Individuation Test for Emerging Adults-Short (ITEA-S) to identify groups of emerging adults sharing similar individuation profiles (types) in relation to mother and father separately. Two-step clustering procedures of self-report data of Slovenian and Austrian participants suggested four internally replicable types of individuation across parents and countries: dependent, anxious, individuated-related, and individuated-independent. We revealed a moderate cross-parent structural consistency of the types and a fair cross-parent consistency of the participants’ type membership within each country. The structural consistency across countries was moderate for the types in relation to mother, but almost perfect in relation to father. Overall, individuals assigned to the anxious type scored the lowest and those classified as individuated-related scored the highest on emotional and psychological well-being (PWB. The results suggest the robustness of the ITEA-S types across parents in the two countries, and their associations with positive outcomes, supporting the validity of the types.