Maternal Life Satisfaction and Child Development from Toddlerhood to Adolescence

Nabanita Datta Gupta, Jonas Jessen and C. Katharina Spiess

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2026, issue Online first articles, 42 pages

Abstract: We analyse how maternal life satisfaction impacts child development at different ages from toddlerhood to adolescence. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, which captures maternal life satisfaction and various age-specific measures of child development, we identify a strong positive association between mothers’ life satisfaction and their children’s development when these are toddlers (2-3 years), of primary school age (5-10 years) and in adolescence (11-14 years). This relationship holds when we control for a wide range of potentially confounding factors, including education, employment, household income and maternal personality traits. We confirm our main findings using an instrumental variable estimation, where we instrument contemporaneous maternal life satisfaction with pre-birth levels, and with a value-added model leveraging the fact that some child outcomes are observed twice at different ages. Our findings suggest that mothers’ life satisfaction is beneficial for their children’s development at all ages and that it is fruitful for policy makers to identify measures through which maternal well-being can be raised. Looking at the association between paternal life satisfaction and child development, we find similarly sized coefficients for some outcomes, but smaller, statistically insignificant estimates for others.

Keywords: life satisfaction; subjective well-being; mothers; child development; skill formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:338036

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-026-09833-5

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