Mother’s time and child outcomes

It is only recently that research has looked at how much time, not just money, parents invest in their children’s outcomes. In a special issue of the Economic Journal, Emilia Del Bono et al. (2016) addressed this issue up front. The authors suggest new ways of measuring maternal time inputs which take into account both the type (such as reading stories to younger children, and helping older ones with homework) and the intensity of parental activities.

The more time spent with children, the more likely it is that the parent will be able to acquire new information on their child skills and adjust their investments accordingly. The analysis of parental time investments thus allows researchers to gauge more clearly how important “feedback effects” might be.

All this is explored using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study to analyse different measures of child development, encompassing both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects, from age 3 to age 7.

There are three main results:

First, maternal time investments in both recreational and educational activities are very strongly linked to child cognitive skill development in the pre-school years but this association becomes less clear-cut after age 5.

Second, there is evidence that non-cognitive child skills are less subject to change.

Third, both these results are sensitive to different ways of accounting for feedback effects, with parents responding to past outcomes by adjusting their how they spend their time and money. When feedback effects are explicitly considered in the statistical modelling, maternal time inputs are always shown to have a positive impact on child outcomes.

This research highlights the importance of understanding not only how parental inputs affect child outcomes, but also how the evolution of child skills affects parents’ choices.