The Role of Parenting in Child Development

We start by considering the implications of unequal parenting for children’s outcomes later in life. The literature on child development has established that the development process is cumulative and that early achievements foster additional learning later on. To highlight this issue, we document how parenting decisions and the family environment correlate with long-run outcomes such as graduating from college. In our analysis, we touch upon a dimension that is less salient in the two chapters: parenting style. We show that parenting style is not a mere by-product of families’ socio-economic status. Rather, it is associated with children’s outcomes in a way that is distinct from the influence of socio-economic factors such as parents’ education and race. We also argue that the choice of parenting styles is responsive to changes in the environment where children grow up. We show that parenting styles vary systematically across countries with different policies and institutions. This evidence suggests that understanding how parents adjust their behaviour to policy changes is important for drawing useful policy implications. These insights could be especially important for policies aiming to alleviate inequality in early childhood outcomes as parents’ endogenous responses could potentially either magnify or dampen the direct effect of policy interventions.