Children's schooling and parents' behavior: Evidence from the Head Start Impact Study

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Abstract

Parents may have important effects on their children, but little work in economics explores whether children's schooling opportunities crowd out or encourage parents' investment in children. We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study, which granted randomly chosen preschool-aged children the opportunity to attend Head Start. We find that Head Start causes a substantial increase in parents' involvement with their children—such as time spent reading to children, math activities, or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children—both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in Head Start.

Highlights

► We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study. ► This study granted randomly chosen children the opportunity to attend Head Start. ► Head Start increases parents' involvement with their children. ► This is true both during and after the children's pre-school years.

Introduction

Parent inputs may have important effects on child outcomes (e.g. Becker and Tomes, 1976, Becker and Tomes, 1986, Becker, 1981, Todd and Wolpin, 2003, Sacerdote, 2007).1 In analyzing the return to schooling, it is possible to distinguish the direct impact that schooling programs have on children from the indirect impact that is mediated through the effect that schooling has on parent investment in children. If parents have large impacts on their children, these indirect effects may be important. A priori, we do not know the sign of these indirect effects: schooling inputs could encourage or crowd out parent inputs. Furthermore, the degree to which government inputs cause parent inputs to increase or decrease helps to determine the efficiency of government expenditure on schooling: many believe that government-provided schooling may supplant parents' role to some extent. As Becker and Tomes (1986) write in their theoretical analysis of crowdout of parent investment by public expenditure: “Compensatory responses of parents apparently greatly weaken the effects of…some Head Start programs.”2 If investment in children is costly to parents, then estimating the impact of schooling programs on parents' investment is also relevant to a full welfare analysis of the programs. Despite the importance of these questions, there is little empirical work in economics on how schooling programs impact parents' effort investment in children.3

The Head Start Impact Study (HSIS) represents a promising setting for investigating this issue in the context of Head Start (HS). HS is a government program that provides preschool to low-income children. Like many schooling programs, one specific goal of HS is to increase parent involvement with their children. First-time applicants to HS for the fall of 2002 were randomly selected by HSIS for access to HS.4 HSIS followed the children and their parents for several subsequent years, collecting information on a variety of child and parent outcomes both during and after the pre-school years (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010, henceforth HHS, 2010).

We find that in response to children's HS access, parents are substantially and statistically significantly more involved with their children along a wide variety of dimensions, particularly along those dimensions that appear to be investments in child human capital.5 For example, parents read to their children more often, and for a longer amount of time at each sitting, when their children have access to HS than when they do not. Interestingly, even after children are no longer attending HS, their parents appear to invest more in them. This stands in striking contrast to work on the impact of HS on test scores, which finds that HS has positive effects on test scores while children are enrolled in HS but that these test score gains may quickly “fade” (Currie and Thomas, 1995, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, 2010), as we describe in greater detail below. When we use access to HS as an instrument for HS enrollment, we find that the point estimates of the mean increase in parent investment in children is 15% of a standard deviation while children are in their pre-school years and 6% of a standard deviation after their pre-schools years. These findings on parent involvement during and after the experiment constitute the core of the paper. Our results show that HS is successful in its goal of increasing parent involvement with children.

Intriguingly, we find that across HS programs, those programs that raised children's cognitive test scores more also tended to raise parents' involvement with their children more. We discuss a variety of mechanisms that may be consistent with our findings, including the possibility that HS programs that are particularly effective in raising children's cognitive scores also tend to be particularly effective in raising parents involvement, as well as the possibility that HS impacts parent involvement in part because parents perceive their involvement to be complementary with child schooling in the production of child qualities. We present a simple model that captures these potential explanations for the observed effects. It is important to note that Head Start directly encourages parent involvement, and such direct encouragement falls outside the scope of the mechanisms envisioned in the Becker and Tomes model; thus, our results are unable to address the parental motivations postulated in this model.

There are few papers in the economics literature that examine the relationship between schooling and parent inputs. In a developing country context, Pop-Eleches and Urquiola (forthcoming) and Das et al. (2011) find evidence consistent with substitutability between parent and schooling inputs.6 Our analysis builds on studies that have empirically examined aspects of HS and its impact on children. HHS (2010) investigates data from the HSIS, focusing primarily on the impact of HS on children's cognitive and non-cognitive test scores. As we describe later, HHS (2010) also investigates certain measures of parent involvement with their children but finds very limited evidence that parent involvement was impacted. The HSIS collected a rich set of data that are not analyzed in HHS (2010) but that we analyze in this study; these data show a strong impact of HS on a wide variety of parent involvement outcomes. Relative to HHS (2010), we investigate the impact of HS on an order of magnitude more parent outcomes; using data on more outcomes reveals that many outcomes HHS (2010) does not explore are significantly affected by HS enrollment. We explore the mechanisms through which the effect on parent involvement may operate, including by documenting the positive cross-program correlation between effects on cognitive scores and effects on parent involvement. Finally, we place our results in a possible theoretical context.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 describes the Head Start Impact Study. Section 3 lays out the basic empirical approach of the paper. Section 4 presents our basic results and various robustness checks. It also compares our results to HHS (2010). Section 5 discusses the results and suggests several mechanisms that may underlie them. It also puts our results in the context of other work on parent involvement, child outcomes, and early childhood interventions. Section 6 concludes.

Section snippets

Head Start and the Head Start Impact Study

Head Start is a program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that provides education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. In 2009, HS provided services to 904,153 children, 54% of whom were four years old or older, and 46% of whom were three years old or younger. Services were provided by 1591 programs operating 49,200 classrooms. The average per-child expenditure was $7600. Eligibility is largely income-based—families

Basic empirical approach

In our main specification, we use an instrumental variables (IV) procedure:HeadStartip=α0+α1Tip+Xipα+vipYip=β0+β1HeadStartip+Xipβ+uipEq. (1) is the first stage equation, and Eq. (2) is the second stage. In Eq. (1), HeadStartip is a dummy that equals 1 if the child is enrolled in HS and 0 otherwise; Tip is a dummy variable measuring whether individual i in program p is part of the treatment or control group in the experiment; α0 is a constant; α1 is the first stage coefficient on treatment; and α

Effect of HS access on parent inputs

Appendix Table 2 (available online) shows the effect of treatment on each dependent variable relating to parent involvement with children.16

Discussion

This section explores several non-mutually-exclusive hypotheses that could account for the impact of HS on parent involvement. First, specific features of HS programs, such as the extent to which HS centers encourage parents to volunteer in the centers, could in turn encourage parents to be more involved with their children. Second (third), parents could perceive their involvement with their children as complementary to observed (unobserved) changes in child characteristics, such as cognitive

Conclusion

We investigate the effect of HS enrollment on parents' involvement with their children. We find that when children enroll in HS, their parents are more involved with them along a wide variety of dimensions, both during and after the period when children are enrolled in the program.57 This finding is robust across a variety of analyses. The size of the effect of HS on parents' involvement

Acknowledgements

We thank Jay Bhattacharya, Hanley Chiang, David Cutler, David Deming, Mark Duggan, Olivia Mitchell, Michael Puma, Dan Sacks, Todd Sinai, Danny Yagan, and seminar participants at Wharton for suggestions. Gelber acknowledges financial support from the Center for Human Resources, the Risk and Decision Processes Center, and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics, all at Wharton. Isen acknowledges financial support from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant

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