Maternal Continuing Human Capital Investment and Its Effect on the School-Age Children's Developmental Outcome

Purpose:

The literature has well documented the existence of intergenerational returns to human capital (HC): there is positive relationship between mothers' accumulated HC investment (usually measured by education) and children's academic achievement. However, the studies of the effect of mother's continuing HC investment during child-raising period are limited. In this paper, I will look at a particular group of women, who choose attaining more schooling and/or job-related training while raising children, and discover the effect of maternal continuing HC investment on children's behavioral and academic outcomes.

Methods:

Theoretically, there are two competing consequences from mother's involvement in their own HC investment. From the perspective of resources allocation theory, mothers will reduce their time and activities staying with their children which possibly cause children's negative outcome such as increased parent-child stress, behavioral problems. Also, the home environment and the types of child care without mother's presence might be much more different than those with mother's presence. It is possible mother's absence may provide a less nurturing home environment and generate some undesirable effect on children. In contrast, from the perspective of HC investment theory, the augmented maternal capacity may benefit children in terms of higher family income, better intergenerational endowment transfer, more active school involvement, and better development opportunities. Furthermore, mothers' own investment may have positive externality effect on children---mother becomes the role model of children in many aspects such as efficient time management, value of work, motivation enhancement and self-improvement home environment. Which effect is dominating is an empirical question! Regarding the statistical analysis, I will employ the Fixed-Effect model to solve the selection bias problem. Mothers who chose augmenting HC may be different systematically than mothers who did not. The FE model will take into account of those unobserved heterogeneity and get unbiased estimates of maternal schooling and/or job-related training on the children's developmental outcome.

The data source for this study is the youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and its associated survey of children. Three measures of children development outcomes will be used in my paper: the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) which measures children's mathematics and reading achievement; the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) which represent children's ability; the Behavior Problem Index (BPI) which measures the children's anti-social behaviors.

Results:

The analysis yields some positive effects of maternal continuing HC investment on developmental outcome for children. Fixed-Effect results significantly differ from OLS results, suggesting that the effects of maternal augmented HC on children's outcome may be partly a reflection of unobserved differences between mothers who choose to pursue improvement and who do not during child-raising period.

Implications:

The findings will increase our understanding of intergenerational returns to HC investment and thereafter welfare transfers. Policies should be initiated to assist mother's participation in self improvements. Especially, if such policies can help those mothers with disadvantaged socioeconomic background, the positive benefits for their subsequent children will reduce the inequality and social tension.