1-063 - Associations Among Infant Health, Parental Investments, and Early Child Development: Variation by Socioeconomic Status

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children’s health status, measured by early indicators like birth weight, and their early environments, measured in terms of the quantity and quality of parental investments, independently influence children’s development. Moreover, early health status and parental investments vary by socioeconomic status (SES) in ways that partially account for the well-documented socioeconomic gap in children’s early outcomes. The three papers in this panel illuminate three outstanding questions about how infant health, parental investments and socioeconomic status combine to shape development: First, how does infant health shape parenting behavior? Second, does infant health shape parenting behavior similarly across families of lower versus higher SES? Third, do early parental investments benefit infants with poorer early health more than healthier infants in terms of later outcomes? Each paper uses sophisticated methods to address the endogeneity inherent in estimating associations among infant health, early investments and child outcomes, including the comparison of parenting across siblings with different health status and the examination of a randomized trial of Mexico’s landmark educational program, Progresa. The papers find that lower SES parents exhibit lower quantity and quality parent-child interactions across multiple measures, that parents are less stimulating with less healthy infants, but that less healthy infants benefit more from enriched early environments than healthier ones. An expert in the study of socioeconomic differences in parental investments will discuss the implications of the findings that parental investments may reinforce children’s early health and environment disadvantages, whereas programs to enhance parents’ early investments can buffer against that reinforcement.

Sub Unit

• Family Context & Processes

Chair

• Rebecca Ryan, Georgetown University

Discussant

• Ariel Kalil, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Differential Parenting with Biologically Vulnerable versus Non-Vulnerable Children by Socioeconomic Status - Rebecca Ryan, Georgetown University; Presenting Author: Christina Padilla, Georgetown University; Caitlin Hines, Georgetown University

• Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the Progresa Experiment - Presenting Author: Teresa Molina, University of Southern California; Achyuta Adhvaryu, University of Michigan; Anant Nyshadham, Boston College; Jorge Tamayo, University of Southern California

• Measuring Inequality in Parental Investments by Socioeconomic Status - Presenting Author: Van Ngoc Thu Pham, Rice University; Flavio Cunha, Rice University