Parental Investments in Early Childhood and the Gender Gap in Math and Literacy

Abstract

Parental investments shape children's educational specializations. Using a longitudinal study, we find that parents invest more in daughters than sons at ages three through five. We find that early parental investment can explain persistently higher English scores for girls than boys four to six years later. However, there is no gender gap in math. Parental investments at ages three through five appear to contribute to girls' advantage in English but have little impact on math. Our results suggest that parental investments at early ages contributes to girls' comparative advantage in English.

It's all in the stars: The Chinese zodiac and the effects of parental investments on offspring's cognitive and noncognitive skill development

“…Our estimation results are comparable with findings in other scenarios that also examine the impact of parental investment on children's skills. Chuan et al (2022) finds that a 50% increase in parental investment can raise English score of a child between 8 and 14 years old by 0.2 standard deviation in a survey conducted between 2010 and 2014 in Chicago.…”

“…Chuan et al. (2022) finds that a 50% increase in parental investment can raise English score of a child between 8 and 14 years old by 0.2 standard deviation in a survey conducted between 2010 and 2014 in Chicago.…”

“…However, identifying the causal impact of parental investment on child skills is difficult due to parents' private information on children and the resulting endogeneity in investment choice (Do & Phung, 2010; Vere, 2008; Wong & Yung, 2005; Zhang et al., 2014). Our work not only provides new direct evidence of the positive impact of parental investment on children's cognitive and noncognitive skills (Chuan et al., 2010, 2022; Cunha & Heckman, 2008), but also proposes a new identification strategy by exploiting the relatively random assignment of Chinese zodiac signs around narrow birth windows.…”

First Among Equals? How Birth Order Shapes Child Development

“…14 Parents also report spending more time teaching language than mathematics at home (Cannon and Ginsburg, 2008). There is little empirical evidence, however, that directly estimates how returns to parental investments differ between reading and mathematics, but Chuan et al (2022) find that an interventioninduced increase in parental investments had a larger positive effect on reading than on mathematics. There are substantially larger for reading than for mathematics.…”