Early Maternal Time Investment and Early Child Outcomes

Abstract

Using large longitudinal survey data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, this article estimates the relationship between maternal time inputs and early child development.We find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age.There is evidence of long-term effects of early maternal time inputs on later outcomes, especially in the case of cognitive skill development.In the case of non-cognitive development, the evidence of this long-term impact disappears when we account for skill persistence.The importance of parental time in determining child attainment has long been recognised by economists (Becker, 1965; Hill and Stafford, 1974; Leibowitz, 1974, 1977).Despite this, there are surprisingly few empirical studies that analyse the effect of parental time inputs on child outcomes.Using a large representative data set on British children and their families, this article's objective is to provide new evidence on how the time mothers devote to activities with their children affects early child outcomes and how this relationship changes over time.Much recent research has found that skills measured in pre-school years are strong predictors of later life outcomes (Keane and Wolpin, 1997; Cameron and Heckman, 1998; Cunha et al., 2006; Conti et al., 2016) and that, by the time children enter primary school education, significant differences in verbal and mathematical competence exist among them (Feinstein, 2003; Cunha and Heckman, 2007, 2008; Cunha et al., 2010). 1 Given this growing and compelling evidence, many studies have explored the potential determinants of such skills focusing on a wide variety of markers, such as childhood family income and family structure, parental education, mother's employment, child care, school quality, parental leave entitlements and neighbourhood characteristics (Haveman and Wolfe, 1995;