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Demography

Erschienen in:

01.11.2012

Is Biology Destiny? Birth Weight and Differential Parental Treatment

verfasst von: Amy Hsin

Erschienen in: Demography | Ausgabe 4/2012

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Abstract

Time diaries of sibling pairs from the PSID-CDS are used to determine whether maternal time investments compensate for or reinforce birth-weight differences among children. The findings demonstrate that the direction and degree of differential treatment vary by mother’s education. Less-educated mothers devote more total time and more educationally oriented time to heavier-birth-weight children, whereas better-educated mothers devote more total and more educationally oriented time to lower-birth-weight children. The compensating effects observed among highly educated mothers are substantially larger than the reinforcing effects among the least-educated mothers. The findings show that families redistribute resources in ways that both compensate for and exacerbate early-life disadvantages.

Vorheriger Artikel Diverging Destinies: Maternal Education and the Developmental Gradient in Time With Children

Nächster Artikel Fertility Transitions and Schooling: From Micro- to Macro-Level Associations

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An exception is Datar et al. (2010), who examined socioeconomic variation in investment strategies and did not find evidence that birth weight effects on early health investments and preschool attendance vary by mother’s education or family income.

Two exceptions are Datar et al. (2010) and Almond and Currie (2009). These studies are discussed in detail in the literature review.

Several alternative specifications were also examined, including piecewise linear splines and multiple indicators of birth-weight categories. None of these alternative specifications yielded statistically significant results.

Another commonly used measure of family SES is family income. However, family income is likely to be endogenous with the dependent variable (i.e., more time working means more income and less time with children). Mother’s education, on the other hand, is less likely to suffer from this problem because her schooling is likely completed by the time she has given birth. Models that include statistical interactions between birth weight and family income were also estimated. The point estimates using family income generally move in the same direction as those using mother’s education. However, estimates using family income were less statistically significant.

In supplementary analysis (not shown here), all analyses were estimated on samples stratified by mother’s education (i.e., mothers with less than 12 years of schooling and mothers with at least 12 years of schooling). Perhaps because stratification reduces sample size, birth weight was not significantly associated with time investments in these models. The point estimates, however, largely confirmed the results presented in this study.

I conducted additional analyses (not presented here) in which I restricted the age difference between sibling pairs to not more than 48, 36, 24, and 18 months. When age differences are restricted to no more than 48 months, the results are similar to the results presented in Table 2 for the full sample of siblings (N = 1,082). When age differences are restricted to no more than 36, 24, and 18 months, the results become statistically insignificant (sample sizes fall to 846, 470, and 222, respectively).

Because OLS estimates are likely to be biased and because results were largely insignificant, only sibling fixed-effect models are presented here. OLS estimates control for the following covariates: child’s gender, sibship size, indicator for being the younger child, indicator for being of school age, race, family income, mother’s education, mother’s age at child’s birth, marital status at child’s birth, and maternal employment.

In order to further explore the possibility that parental response to birth-weight differences among siblings depends on aspects of family composition, I examined interactions between birth weight, on the one hand, and the child’s age, gender, and birth order, on the other. None of these interactions produced statistically significant results.

As a robustness check to rule out the possibility of measurement error, fixed-effects analysis was conducted on a restricted sample of siblings who reported a difference of no more than 30 hours per week in maternal time. The results were not substantially different from analyses using the full sample of siblings.

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Titel: Is Biology Destiny? Birth Weight and Differential Parental Treatment
verfasst von: Amy Hsin
Publikationsdatum: 01.11.2012
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Demography / Ausgabe 4/2012
Print ISSN: 0070-3370
Elektronische ISSN: 1533-7790
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0123-y

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