The role of parental investments for cognitive and noncognitive skill formation—Evidence for the first 11 years of life

Katja Coneus, Manfred Laucht and Karsten Reuß ()

Economics & Human Biology, 2012, vol. 10, issue 2, 189-209

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of parental investments on the development of cognitive, mental and emotional skills during childhood using data from a longitudinal study, the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk, starting at birth. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use reliable measures of the child's cognitive, mental and emotional skills as well as accurate measures of parental investments. The observed investments include parental health behaviour, playing and talking with the child, play materials, leisure activities and others. Second, we estimate latent factor models to account for unobserved characteristics of children. Third, we examine the skill development for girls and boys separately, as well as for children who were born with either organic or psychosocial risk. We find a decreasing impact of parental investments on cognitive and mental skills over time, while emotional skills seem to be unaffected by parental investments in childhood. Thus, inequality at birth persists during childhood. Since families are the main sources of education during the first years of life, our results have important implications for the quality of the parent–child relationship. Improving maternal health during pregnancy and parental investments in infancy can yield large benefits for cognitive and mental development later in childhood.

Keywords: Cognitive skills; Noncognitive skills; Critical and sensitive periods; Initial risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I21 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X11000062
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Chapter: The Role of parental investments for cognitive and noncognitive skill formation – Evidence for the first 11 years of life (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:10:y:2012:i:2:p:189-209

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2011.01.003

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().