This study (N = 520 high-school students) investigates the influence of parental work involvement on adolescents’ own plans regarding their future work involvement. As expected, adolescents’ perceptions of parental work behavior affected their plans for own work involvement. Same-sex parents served as main role models for the adolescents’ own plans, whereas opposite-sex parents served as models for the preferred degree of work participation for the adolescents’ future life partners. Interestingly, ideals of how much one’s own parents should have worked were substantially more important than the actual parental work involvement during their childhood. Adolescents, then, are influenced by their parents as role models but they reflect and modify these models according to their beliefs regarding an ideal balance of work and family.
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