Maternal Life Satisfaction and Child Development from Toddlerhood to Adolescence

Nabanita Datta Gupta, Jonas Jessen and C. Katharina Spieß ()
Additional contact information
C. Katharina Spieß: Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB)

No 16155, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we analyse the association between maternal well-being and child develop- ment at different ages. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) which captures maternal life satisfaction and numerous cognitive and non-cognitive child development outcomes. We identify a strong positive association between mothers' life satisfaction and their children's development when these are toddlers (2-3 years, VAB scores), of primary school age (5-10 years, SEB scores and Big 5) and in adolescence (11-14 years, life satisfaction, school grades and self-reported Big 5). This relationship holds when we control for a wide range of potentially confounding factors, including maternal education, employment, household income and maternal personality traits. We confirm our main findings with an IV estimation where we instrument contemporaneous maternal life satisfaction with that measured pre-birth and with a value-added model as 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.

Keywords: life satisfaction; subjective well-being; mothers; child development; skill formation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hap, nep-mfd and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16155.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Maternal Life Satisfaction and Child Development from Toddlerhood to Adolescence (2023)
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:iza:izadps:dp16155

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().