Parental health and children's cognitive and noncognitive development: New evidence from the longitudinal survey of Australian children

Abstract

Summary This paper examines the effects of parental health on cognitive and noncognitive development in Australian children. The underlying nationally representative panel data and a child fixed effects estimator are used to deal with unobserved heterogeneity. We find that only father's serious mental illness worsens selected cognitive and noncognitive skills of children. Maternal poor health also deteriorates some cognitive and noncognitive outcomes of children of lone mothers only. Our results demonstrate that either failing to account for parent–child fixed effects or using child noncognitive skills reported by parents could overestimate the harmful impact of poor parental health on child development.

The Impact of Maternal Mental Health Shocks on Child Health: Estimates from Fixed-Effects Instrumental Variables Models for Two Cohorts of Australian Children

“…Regarding the measurement errors issue, current literature shows that mothers with worse mental health are more likely to report that their children have health or behavioural problems. This suggests using mother-reported measures of child health would over-estimate the harmful impact of maternal mental health on child health (De Reyes and Kazdin, 2005;Le and Nguyen, 2015). This measurement error issue appears to present in our data as controlling for individual heterogeneity only removes the statistical significance of all estimates for all likely objective measures of child health (i.e.…”

“…This paper examines the impact of maternal mental health on child health, relating to a very large body of literature on intergenerational transmissions in various aspects such as income or education (Solon, 1999;Black and Devereux, 2011). It also relates to a rich body of literature on the impact of parental income on child health (Case et al, 2002;Apouey and Geoffard, 2013;Fletcher and Wolfe, 2014;Khanam et al, 2014;Kuehnle, 2014), as well as emerging literature on the effects of parental health on child education (Bratti and Mendola, 2014;Alam, 2015;Le and Nguyen, 2015). 1 However, this paper more closely connects to an emerging body of research focusing on the relationship between parental health and child health.…”

“…Measurement error issues are also likely as objective measures of child health are not always available in surveyed data and researchers are constrained to use child health measures reported by parents. Parents' reports of their children' health may be influenced by parental health states (De Reyes and Kazdin, 2005;Le and Nguyen, 2015), thus biased estimates of intergenerational correlation in health may be found by using these child health measures.…”

Out of sight but not out of mind: Home countries' macroeconomic volatilities and immigrants' mental health

“…Specifically, we introduce indicators for two adverse events into Equation : the death of a close friend and the serious injury or illness of a family member in the year prior to the survey time. These two events may have taken place randomly to the individual immigrants so their estimates from Equation are unbiased (Frijters et al, ; Nguyen & Connelly, ; Le & Nguyen, , ). The results of this exercise (reported in Table ) show the well‐determined CPI impact: It is negative and statistically significant for all mental health measures, except the social functioning and RE scales.…”

Are Children's Socio-Emotional Skills Shaped by Parental Health Shocks?

“…Our paper adds to a short list of previous studies that have found mixed results of changes in parental self-reported health on child personality or problem behavior, ranging from negative effects (Mühlenweg et al, 2016;Cuadros-Menaca et al, 2018) to no effects (Le and Nguyen, 2017). Our empirical setting should be in the best position to identify any effect, because we consider objective health shocks that are arguably more severe than changes in self-reported health.…”