Children’s Achievement, Gender, and Parental Investment: Norms from a National Survey Experiment

• In Event: 546 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. Parental Involvement and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

How should parents distribute resources between children when children’s achievement and gender vary? Intra-family resource distribution is a matter of persistent interest in the social sciences, but research is consistently hindered by methodological limitations such as endogeneity and isolating the effects of explanatory variables. In this paper, I use data from a national survey experiment specially designed to examine the causal effects of children’s relative achievement and gender on parental investment preferences. Respondents (N=3,490) were asked to distribute 11 family resources between two children whose achievement and/or gender were experimentally manipulated. I find that respondents allocate academic resources to lower achievers and enrichment resources to higher achievers. Moreover, respondents’ distributions to girls and boys mirror those based on achievement. Boys typically receive resources associated with lower achievement, and girls receive resources associated with higher achievement. I argue that children’s characteristics play a distinct role in intra-family resource distribution, and that parental investment norms can be used to reveal latent assumptions about children’s characteristics in the U.S.

Author

• Natasha Yurk Quadlin, Indiana University