Maternal Education and Investments in Children's Health
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| Author | Kate C. Prickett,Jennifer March Augustine |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12253 |
K C. P University of Texas at Austin
J M A University of South Carolina∗
Maternal Education and Investments
in Children’s Health
Maternal education differences in children’s
academic skills have been strongly linked
to parental investment behaviors. This study
extended this line of research to investigate
whether these same maternal education pat-
terns in parenting are observed among a set of
parenting behaviors that are linked to young
children’s health. Drawing on data from the
Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth
Cohort (n=5,000) and longitudinal models
incorporating random effects, the authors found
that higher levels of maternal education were
associated with more advantageous health
investment behaviors at each phase of early
development (9 months, 2 years, 4 years, 5
years). Moreover, these disparities were typi-
cally largest at the developmental stage when
it was potentially most sensitive for children’s
long-term health and development. These nd-
ings provide further evidence of a developmental
gradient associated with mothers’ education
and new insight into the salience of mothers’
education for the short- and long-term health
and well-being of their children.
The Population Research Center, University of Texas at
Austin, 305 E. 23rd St., G1800, Austin, TX 78712
(kate.prickett@utexas.edu).
∗Department of Sociology, Sloan College, Universityof
South Carolina, 911 Pickens St., Columbia, SC 29208.
This article was edited by Deborah Carr.
Key Words: child health, early childhood, family processes,
health disparities, parent education, parenting.
The classic status attainment model argues
that education begets various benets that help
parents promote the academic success, earning
potential, and social class position of their chil-
dren. As such, parents’ socioeconomic status is
reproduced in their children (Blau & Duncan,
1967; Sewell, Haller, & Portes, 1969). More
contemporary studies have expanded on the
basic status attainment model to yield additional
insights into how parents’ status is reproduced.
First, this intergenerational phenomenon is
set in motion when children are young. For
example, parents’ education has been linked
to their children’s wages in adulthood via their
early academic skills (Heckman, 2006). Second,
parental education differences in children’s
early academic skills are connected to parents’
investment behaviors, perhaps more so than the
economic factors that correlate with education
(Augustine, 2014; Mayer, 1997). Third, parental
education not only begets higher levels of
parental investment but also helps parents better
adapt to meet the changing developmental needs
of their children (Kalil, Ryan, & Corey, 2012).
Finally, the connection between parents’ and
children’s socioeconomic status that is formed
during early childhood extends beyond chil-
dren’s academic skills to their health (Palloni,
2006). For example, child health has forecast
adult labor market participation and mortality
(Case, Fertig, & Paxson, 2005; Haas, Glymour,
& Berkman, 2011).
In this study we weaved together these four
ideas to examine whether mothers’ education
Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (February 2016): 7–25 7
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12253
8Journal of Marriage and Family
is positively associated with investments in
children’s health during early childhood and
whether education differences in these invest-
ments will be most pronounced at child ages
when a specic health need is more intensive or
developmentally important. Our specic focus
on health-related parenting aimed to advance our
understanding of the reproduction of inequality
by connecting maternal education to several
health investment behaviors previously associ-
ated with children’s health outcomes that have
yet to be explicitly and consistently linked to
maternal education throughout early childhood.
Our investigation on variation in the levels of
such practices by mothers’ education at different
“sensitive” periods of early childhood speaks
to a widening socioeconomic gap in children’s
opportunity for mobility observed by various
scholars and often termed diverging destinies
(McLanahan, 2004).
To preview our approach, one hypothesis
we tested is that maternal education disparities
would consistently be associated with greater
frequency of meeting the recommended number
of and timing of child well-child visits when
children are young (birth through kindergarten)
but that this difference would be widest during
infancy, when the number of recommended
pediatric visits is much greater (around four vs.
one) and thus the difculty in meeting such rec-
ommendations is too. In addition to preventative
health, we tested hypotheses related to chil-
dren’s nutrition, shared family dinners, physical
activity, television watching, safety, and smoke
exposure—all concepts previously linked to
child health outcomes. Our sample was a large,
nationally representative cohort of children born
in 2001 whose families participated in the Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort
(ECLS-B; see http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/birth.asp).
The results of this study provide a fresh under-
standing of the salience of maternal education
to parenting behaviors connected to children’s
health and further insight into the origins of the
reproduction of inequality.
B
Maternal Education and Health-Related
Parenting
At present, scholars have amassed substan-
tial evidence linking mothers’ education with
various child physical health outcomes, such
as general health and asthma (Chen, Martin,
& Matthews, 2006; Spencer, 2005). The main
explanation for the connection between mater-
nal education and child health (net of income
or other economic resources) is that education
provides women with more knowledge of and
commitment to appropriate health practices
(e.g., nutrition information, safety behaviors;
Black, Morris, Smith, Townsend, & Whitehead,
1988; Gage, Fang, O’Neill, & Dirienzo, 2013).
Thus, it stands to reason that we would observe
maternal education differences in the parenting
behaviors that promote children’s health. Yet
few studies have examined this association.
Studies of maternal education have focused
on various prenatal health behaviors, such as
drinking or health care utilization (Mangrio,
Hansen, Lindström, Köhler, & Rosvall, 2011;
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
2013). The research on health-related parenting
behaviors beyond this prenatal period, however,
has typically focused on other socioeconomic
indicators as predictors, such as race and ethnic
background or income (Hesketh, Ball, Craw-
ford, Campbell, & Salmon, 2007; Tandon et al.,
2012).
Thus, the rst aim of this study was to docu-
ment that maternal education is associated with
higher levels of investment in children’s health,
net of other socioeconomic factors, across var-
ious domains (e.g., nutrition, physical activity)
and child ages (9 months, 2 years, 4 years, 5
years). In doing so, we created a link to the lit-
eratures noted above as well as to the research
linking various health-related parenting behav-
iors to a variety of general (obesity) and specic
child health disorders (asthma). Among these
behaviors, child nutrition, preventative health,
physical activity, television watching, maternal
smoking, and safety are considered the key (or
least most observable) factors that fall within
parents’ control (e.g., Case & Paxson, 2002;
Østbye et al., 2013; Philips, Sioen, Michels,
Sleddens, & De Henauw, 2014). Consistent with
economic models of health production (see Cur-
rie, 2009), we conceptualized such behaviors as
health investments because they require time,
energy, and a strategy to effectively and ef-
ciently implement. They also pave the way for
good long-term health (Aizer & Currie, 2014).
This investigation of the link between mater-
nal education and health-related parenting
during early childhood also has other theoretical
roots: literatures exploring maternal education
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