Using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information on working histories of Italian men, we investigate the relationship between parental background and sons’ earnings profiles. We find that the parental influence on sons’ earnings persists over the career and that the direct influence controlling for sons’ education is large and grows during the working career. After twenty years of experience, our baseline specification indicates that an additional year of parental education is associated with a 2.0% increase in sons’ wages, while an additional year of son's education is associated with a 4.8% increase. We use educational mobility between parents and sons to disentangle this influence into a glass ceiling effect – a premium for well‐off children who have high educational attainments – and a parachute effect – a premium for well‐off children who acquire less education than their parents. We find that both effects contribute to explain the steeper earnings profiles of the well‐off sons, consistently with the idea that family ties play a crucial allocative role in the Italian labour market.