Evaluating the impact of mothers' self-esteem on early childhood home environment: Evidence from the NLSY

Description

Estimating causal effects of parental characteristics on child outcomes is challenging due to endogeneity issues. Using matched mother–child data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, this paper incorporates an orthogonalisation technique within a two-stage least squares instrumental variables (2SLS-IV) framework. The findings indicate that an increase in mothers’ self-esteem improves the home environment conditions that support children’s cognitive and emotional development, with stronger effects observed among socio-economically disadvantaged families. The magnitude of these effects is either higher than or comparable to those of mothers’ education and cognitive ability. Additionally, the study finds that higher maternal self-esteem is associated with improved reading abilities among children.

Publication Date

1-1-2018

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology (AUT)

Keywords

Childhood development, Home environment, Mothers' self-esteem, Instrumental variables, Orthogonalization

Source Link URL

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Evaluating-the-Impact-of-Mothers%E2%80%99-Self-esteem-on-Dasgupta/a62901f4ad0d9a3c96c75b332ceff8ede932aa08

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS