Family background can influence offspring earnings in two ways: conditioning their educational attainments (indirect effect) and circumscribing their opportunities in the labour market, independently from their educational attainment (direct effect). In this paper, following a multi-steps strategy, we disentangle direct and indirect mechanisms analysing the association between background and several offspring's outcomes (education, labour market achievements, earnings) and taking into account the attainment got in the previous step. We compare 8 EU countries - Germany, France, Spain, Italy, UK, Ireland, Denmark and Finland -, in order to assess whether their very different performances about intergenerational inequality could be related to different roles played by indirect and direct influences of family background on children outcomes in various stages of their lives.