How Parents' Skills Affect Their Time Use with Children: Evidence from an RCT Experiment in Italy

Daniela Del Boca, Chiara Pronzato and Lucia Schiavon

No 2020-081, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of parenting courses on fragile families' time use with their children. Courses aimed at raising parental awareness of the importance of educational activities are offered in four Italian cities (Naples, Reggio Emilia, Teramo and Palermo) within the framework of the social program “FA.C.E. Farsi Comunità Educanti†and with the cooperation of the program “Con i Bambini†. To conduct the impact evaluation, we designed a randomized controlled trial involving random assignment of the families (mostly mothers). At the end of the intervention, we administered an assessment questionnaire both to the treatment group, which took the course, and to the control group, which did not. Comparing the outcomes, we find attending the course increased families' awareness of the importance of educational activities for children, the frequency with which they read to the child, and their desire to spend more time with the child.

Keywords: parenting; use of time; randomized controlled trial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I26 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-exp
Note: ECI, FI
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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/DelBoc ... courses-time-use.pdf First version, November 9, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Parents' skills affect their time-use with children? Evidence from an RCT experiment in Italy (2020)
Working Paper: How Parents' Skills Affect Their Time-Use with Children? Evidence from an RCT Experiment in Italy (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2020-081

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