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Do Parental Absence and Children's Gender Affect Early Childhood Investment? Evidence from Rural Thailand
Abstract
This paper studies how parental absence and children’s gender affect early childhood investment using a new dataset from rural Thailand. We found that relative to boys, girls received more time but less material investment. Relative to children with at least one parent present, children with absent parents received significantly less material investment; however, time investment was not significantly different between the two groups. Based on an economic model of early childhood investment, these results suggest that relative to material investment, time investment is more important for girls than for boys, and for households with absent parents than for households with at least one parent present. The estimation of the elasticity of substitution between time and material investments suggests that both types of investments are surprisingly complementary.
... A conditional cash transfer to female and/or stipend program for girls along with other household factors like educational expenditure from parents and time investment towards daughter is a reason for reverse gender inequality (Asadullah and Chaudhury, 2009;Dinh and Kilenthong, 2019;Wongmonta and Glewwe, 2017). Among other reasons, some are controversial and debated in the existing literature, for instance, feminisation in the school. ...
... Second, the existing evidence shows that girls receive more educational expenditure than boys receive (Wongmonta and Glewwe, 2017). Although Dinh and Kilenthong (2019) have found that girls obtain less material investment than what the boys receive, daughters enjoy more time from parents. It is to note that both educational expenditure and time are the prerequisites for skill development (Attanasio et al., 2015). ...
... This paper suggests that more expenditure from parents on female children may not be the reason for reverse gender inequality in education. Females are receiving more time from parents than males do (Dinh and Kilenthong, 2019), which might be one source of reverse gender inequality in Thailand. ...
This paper aims to analyse gender inequality in schooling, taking the effects of parental education, income, and household structure, using a nationally representative sample from Thailand. The results show that males underperform females in schooling, even though the contributions of parental education, income, and household structure towards males are higher than that of their counterparts. More specifically, males attain almost one year less of schooling than females. The findings of this paper recommend policies to reduce gender inequality and to improve overall human capital in Thailand by promoting boys' schooling through for instance dedicated stipend programs for boys.
The influence of digital technology and sociocultural adaptation is currently quickly changing society. Understanding the disparities between generations was necessary for moving on to the next generation together. The purposes of this research were to 1) study patterns of improving the quality of life of the elderly in different family styles, and 2) develop a curriculum of self-awareness in bringing the parenting skills of the aging population to early childhood using contemplative education. Data were collected by using questionnaires from 525 285 elderly northeast people in one province of Thailand, semi-structured interviews conducted with 22 elderly people. The curriculum of self-awareness used Delphi technique to assess its the appropriateness. Six key attributes were reported in learning participation, acceptance of original experiences, self-guided learning, critical thinking, action, and reflection. Elderly needed self-development for applying knowledge and skills to correct actual parenting situations.
This paper studies the life-cycle impacts of a widely emulated high-quality, intensive early childhood program with long-term follow up. The program starts early in life (at 8 weeks of age) and is evaluated by an RCT. There are multiple treatment effects which we summarize through interpretable aggregates. Girls have a greater number of statistically significant treatment effects than boys and effect sizes for them are generally bigger. The source of this difference is worse home environments for girls with greater scope for improvement by the program. Fathers of sons support their families more than fathers of daughters.
Parental spending on children is often presumed to be one of the main ways that parents invest in children and a main reason why children from wealthier households are advantaged. Yet, although research has tracked changes in the other main form of parental investment-namely, time-there is little research on spending. We use data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine how spending changed from the early 1970s to the late 2000s, focusing particularly on inequality in parental investment in children. Parental spending increased, as did inequality of investment. We also investigate shifts in the composition of spending and linkages to children's characteristics. Investment in male and female children changed substantially: households with only female children spent significantly less than parents in households with only male children in the early 1970s; but by the 1990s, spending had equalized; and by the late 2000s, girls appeared to enjoy an advantage. Finally, the shape of parental investment over the course of children's lives changed. Prior to the 1990s, parents spent most on children in their teen years. After the 1990s, however, spending was greatest when children were under the age of 6 and in their mid-20s.
Guided by theories and empirical research on intergenerational relationships, we examine the phenomenon of grandparents caring for grandchildren in contemporary China. Using a longitudinal dataset (China Health and Nutrition Survey), we document a high level of structural and functional solidarity in grandparent-grandchildren relationships. Intergenerational solidarity is indicated by a high rate of coresidence between grandchildren and grandparents, a sizable number of skipped-generation households (no parent present), extensive childcare involvement by non-coresidential grandparents, and a large amount of care provided by coresidential grandparents. Multivariate analysis further suggests that grandparents' childcare load is adaptive to familial needs, as reflected by the characteristics of the household, household members, and work activities of the mothers.
The growth in labour market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about its implications for child
cognitive development. We estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard
model of household behaviour. The household makes labour supply decisions and provides time and money inputs into the child
quality production process during the development period. Our empirical results indicate that both parents' time inputs are
important for the cognitive development of their children, particularly when the child is young. Money expenditures are less
productive in terms of producing child quality. Comparative statics exercises demonstrate that cash transfers to households
with children have small impacts on child quality due to the relatively low impact of money investments on child outcomes
and the fact that a significant fraction of the transfer is spent on other household consumption and the leisure of the parents.
“Time-use statistics offer a unique tool for exploring a wide range of policy concerns including social change; division of labour; allocation of time for household work; the estimation of the value of household production; transportation; leisure and recreation; pension plans; and health-care programmes, among others” (United Nations). This expertise will discuss recent developments, improvements and future challenges of time use and time budgets for policy and research with focus on international and in particular German national developments. It is written in the sequel of the last German KVI commission report on the improvement of the information infrastructure between sciences and statistics. Topics are: recent :international time use institutions, data archives and surveys; German time use data bases and their access, actual time use research fields and studies; time use and economic and social policy; new methods in time use survey sampling, future developments and European and international challenges. The conclusions recommend first of all a new German Time Use Survey GTUS 2011/12 and urgently calls for its financing and start of organisation. Specific GTUS improvements, SOEP time use issues, a brand new time use panel and a permanent establishment of the German research data centres (RDCs) are recommended in addition.
Using data from the 2003 and 2004 American Time Use Survey, we study the role that socioeconomic factors play in mothers’ time choices. We estimate a four-equation system in which the dependent variables are the minutes used in home production, active leisure, market work, and child caregiving. Our results show that mothers’ caregiving time increases with the number of children, decreases with age of the child, and increases with the price of child care. We also find a substantial positive wage elasticity for caregiving time, while both leisure and home production time declines with increased wages.
This article compares time invested in children across family structures as a means to understand differences in children's development. Using data from the 1997 Panel Study of Income Dynamics' Child Development Supplement, we measure time investments from multiple caregivers and distinguish time children spend with a caregiver alone versus shared with another caregiver. We examine six family structures-married biological parents, cohabiting biological parents, mother and stepfather, mother and cohabiting boyfriend, single mother only, and multigenerational households. The total care-giving time that children receive in married biological parent families and cohabiting biological parent families is comparable to that for children living in stepfather families and multigenerational families. This is because children in stepfather families and multigenerational households receive substantial time investments from nonresident biological fathers and grandparents, respectively. In contrast, children receive little time investment from resident nonbiological father figures; and children in single mother, cohabiting boyfriend, and multigenerational households receive little time investment from their nonresident biological fathers. Finally, children who live with married biological parents receive the greatest share of caregiving time in the form of shared caregiving compared with children in all other family structures. Our findings suggest that having two resident biological caregivers predicts greater time investments in children and that shared parenting may be an important dimension of family structure. © 2014 by The American Academy of Political and Social Science.
This paper explores the effects of a mother’s migration on her children’s well-being. I use children with migrant fathers as the main control group to separately identify the effects coming from remittances from those resulting from parental absence. Exploiting demand shocks as an exogenous source of variation in the probability that the mother migrates, I find suggestive evidence that children of migrant mothers are more likely to lag behind in school compared to children with migrant fathers. Controlling for remittances does not change this result, supporting the hypothesis that a mother’s absence has a stronger detrimental effect than a father’s.
This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic models that rationalize the evidence and unify the treatment effect and family influence literatures. The evidence on the empirical and policy importance of credit constraints in forming skills is examined. There is little support for the claim that untargeted income transfer policies to poor families significantly boost child outcomes. Mentoring, parenting, and attachment are essential features of successful families and interventions to shape skills at all stages of childhood. The next wave of family studies will better capture the active role of the emerging autonomous child in learning and responding to the actions of parents, mentors and teachers.
This article examines the difference in lifetime incomes arising from parental preferences in the allocation of land inheritance and investments in schooling between sons and daughters in the rural Philippines. Sons are preferred with respect to land inheritance, receiving 0.15 additional hectares of land, while daughters are treated more favourably in schooling investments, receiving 1.5 more years of schooling. However, differences in both current and life-cycle incomes between sons and daughters are insignificant. This suggests that Filipino parents allocate intergenerational transfers to equalise incomes among their children, without sacrificing efficiency.
This analysis of the impact of internal migration on the time allocation patterns of the left-behind elderly and children in rural China, 1997–2006, contributes to the literature on changes in the well-being of the left-behind population. Based upon the China Health and Nutrition Survey, the multivariate analysis demonstrates that the migration of household members increases the time spent on farm work and domestic work by the left-behind elderly and children. Migration has a striking gender differentiated impact, with the increase in work time being greater for elderly women and girls than elderly men and boys.
This chapter seeks to set out what Economists have learned about the effects of early childhood influences on later life outcomes, and about ameliorating the effects of negative influences. We begin with a brief overview of the theory which illustrates that evidence of a causal relationship between a shock in early childhood and a future outcome says little about whether the relationship in question biological or immutable. We then survey recent work which shows that events before five years old can have large long term impacts on adult outcomes. Child and family characteristics measured at school entry do as much to explain future outcomes as factors that labor economists have more traditionally focused on, such as years of education. Yet while children can be permanently damaged at this age, an important message is that the damage can often be remediated. We provide a brief overview of evidence regarding the effectiveness of different types of policies to provide remediation. We conclude with a list of some of (the many) outstanding questions for future research. Hard-copy subscribers may access the tables for this paper here.
The stepfather relationship provides a source of potential conflict in remarriage families, because the mother and partner may have different interests in the well-being of children from a prior union. Using three different theoretical perspectives—biology, sociology, and selection—this paper examines the engagement, availability, participation, and warmth of residential fathers in married biological parent, unmarried biological parent, married stepparent, and cohabiting father families. The data come from 2,531 children and their parents who were interviewed during the 1997 wave of the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Biology explains less of father involvement than anticipated once differences between fathers are controlled. Marriage continues to differentiate paternal investment levels, as do age of child and financial responsibility to nonresidential children.
This paper examines the preferences of parents with respect to the allocation of land and investments in schooling between sons and daughters in two generations of households in the rural Philippines. In the older generation, better-educated fathers prefer to invest in sons’ schooling, while land-owning mothers preferentially bestow land to daughters. While gender preference in relation to parental resources has disappeared in the child generation, sons are preferred with respect to land inheritance, while daughters are treated more favorably in schooling investments.
This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for child cognitive and noncognitive skills. Output is determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and stocks of skills in that period to assess the benefits of early investment in children compared to later remediation. We establish nonparametric identification of a general class of nonlinear factor models. A by-product of our approach is a framework for evaluating childhood interventions that does not rely on arbitrarily scaled test scores as outputs and recognizes the differential effects of skills in different tasks. Using the estimated technology, we determine optimal targeting of interventions to children with different parental and personal birth endowments. Substitutability decreases in later stages of the life cycle for the production of cognitive skills. It increases in later stages of the life cycle for the production of noncognitive skills. This finding has important implications for the design of policies that target the disadvantaged. For some configurations of disadvantage and outcomes, it is optimal to invest relatively more in the later stages of childhood.
In this paper the authors estimate a model of the allocation of time within the household using data that allows them to d istinguish between a large number of time uses. The model is explicitly derived within a utility maximization framework and can be estimated by relatively simpl e two-step estimation procedures. The model providesa natural framework to test implications of the more restrictive models of Reuben Gronau_(1977, 1980) and John Graham and Carole Green_(1984). Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.
The trade-off between parents' time with their own kids and market work, and its dependence on out-of-home day care is analyzed in a simultaneous equation framework. Economic incentives primarily work through decisions about market work, while the direct effects on time with children are weak. The results suggest that a change in the mother's working hours has less influence on the parents' time with their children than a change in the father's working hours. This would imply that a policy working to increase the time with people's own children should primarily influence the father's work hours. We also find that parents prefer joint activities with their children, and that out-of-home child care is not chosen as a substitute for own time with children. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003
In this paper we examine changes in the time American children spent with their parents between 1981 and 1997, and the contribution to these changes made by shifting patterns of female labor force participation, family structure, and parental education. We decompose changes into the parts attributable to changes in demographic characteristics and the parts probably due to changes in behavior. In general, children's time with parents did not decrease over the period; in two-parent families it increased substantially. Population-level changes in demographic characteristics exerted only small direct effects on the time children spent with parents.
This study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its 1997 Child Development Supplement to examine how family income matters for young children's development. The sample included 753 children who were between ages 3 and 5 years in 1997. Two sets of mediating factors were examined that reflect two dominating views in the literature: (1) the investment perspective, and (2) the family process perspective. The study examined how two measures of income (stability and level) were associated with preschool children's developmental outcomes (Woodcock-Johnson [W-J] Achievement Test scores and the Behavior Problem Index [BPI]) through investment and family process pathways. Results supported the hypothesis that distinct mediating mechanisms operate on the association between income and different child outcomes. Much of the association between income and children's W-J scores was mediated by the family's ability to invest in providing a stimulating learning environment. In contrast, family income was associated with children's BPI scores primarily through maternal emotional distress and parenting practices. Level of income was associated with W-J letter-word scores and income stability was associated with W-J applied problem scores and BPI, even after all controls were included in the models.
This research links residence with biological and nonbiological married and unmarried parents to the cognitive achievement and behavioral problems of children aged 3-12, controlling for factors that make such families different. The data were drawn from the 1997 Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Achievement differences were not associated with father family structure per se, but with demographic and economic factors that differ across families. In contrast, behavioral problems were linked to family structure even after controls for measured and unmeasuredfactors were included. Children in all family types except the married-biological-parent family showed higher levels of behavioral problems. Paternal and maternal engagement time explained some of the differences in behavioral problems across families. Although children in blended families tended to achieve at lower levels than those not in blendedfamilies, stepchildren in blended families achieved at levels comparable to those of half-siblings. Finally, children in blended families tended to havefewer behavioral problems than those not in blended families.