Low Birth Weight and Parental Investment: Do Parents Favor the Fittest Child?

• Date: 01 June 2013
• Author: Ryan Brooks,Jamie L. Lynch
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12028
• Published date: 01 June 2013

JAMIE L. LYNCH St. Norbert College

RYAN BROOKS The Ohio State University∗

Low Birth Weight and Parental Investment:

Do Parents Favor the Fittest Child?

Do parents contribute to birth weight disparities

in status attainment? This study uses a

nationally representative sample of 8,550

children and 1,450 twins from the Early

Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort

to investigate whether, as recent studies have

suggested, parents favor healthier children.

Children with poor health are found to receive

fewer parental investments, including breast-

feeding and quality parent – child interaction,

but results from between- and within-family

regression models, using low birth weight as

a proxy for child health, f‌ind no evidence that

parents compensate for or reinforce child health

endowments. Instead, birth-weight disparities in

parental investment are linked with observable

family, maternal, and child sociodemographic

characteristics. Our results raise doubts about

the utility of human capital models to explain

health disparities in parental investment and

shed new light on the broad spectrum of

disadvantage faced by children with poor health.

Do parents favor their healthiest children?

Even the suggestion is disturbing to many,

yet ‘‘normal-birth-weight children are 5% – 11%

Department of Sociology, 454 Boyle Hall, 100 Grant St.,

De Pere, WI 54115 (jamie.lynch@snc.edu).

∗Department of Sociology, 238 Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil

Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210.

This paper was edited by Deborah Carr.

Key Words: birth weight, child health, ECLS-B, human

capital, parental investment, twins

more likely to receive early childhood parental

investments than their low-birth-weight sib-

lings’’ (Datar, Kilburn, & Loughran, 2010,

p. 145). Parental investments—which broadly

include economic resources, quality atten-

tion, and social interaction—structure children’s

social, educational, and occupational outcomes

by providing a benef‌icial learning environment

and access to resources that develop life-long

human capital accumulation (Becker, 1964; Blau

& Duncan, 1967; Yeung, Linver, & Brooks-

Gunn, 2002). Much of the research on the

determinants of child health disparities in educa-

tional and occupational attainment has focused

on biological and socioeconomic explanations

(Palloni, 2006), but a strand of economic the-

ory suggests that birth weight disparities in life

chances emerge within the home. Using a sam-

ple of children and twin siblings from the Early

Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort

(ECLS – B), our study builds on this research

by investigating whether parents, seeking to

maximize an economic return, contribute to

health disparities, or whether patterns of parental

investment by health status, like other parenting

practices, are closely linked with variation in

family socioeconomic status (SES).

Why might one child receive more parental

investment than another? Explanations for vari-

ation in parental investment by child health

endowment focus on three possible associations.

Parents may reinforce disadvantages by invest-

ing fewer resources in children with poor health,

parents may reinforce endowments by investing

greater resources in children with better health,

or variation in parental investment by health

Journal of Marriage and Family 75 (June 2013): 533 –543 533

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12028