Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de Concepcion, Concepcion, Chile.
PLoS One. 2023 Oct 13;18(10):e0288186. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288186. eCollection 2023.
Parental behavior is paramount to child health and skill formation, explaining a significant portion of differences in developmental outcomes. However, little is known regarding the distributional effects of parental time allocation at different levels of children's outcomes. I use a national administrative dataset of Chilean pre-school students to the estimate production functions for socioemotional development and body mass index z-scores at every decile of the distribution at baseline. Modest average effects conceal significant heterogeneity on the returns to parental time investments. Children in the bottom of the socioemotional development distribution could gain up to 0.4 standard deviations for a one standard deviation increase in time investments. A similar increase can lead to a reduction of 0.8 standard deviations in body mass index among severely obese students. Evidence reveals that children with high developmental scores are unlikely to benefit from additional parenting time.
父母行为对儿童健康和技能形成至关重要，解释了发展结果差异的很大一部分原因。然而，对于父母在儿童不同结果水平上的时间分配的分配效应知之甚少。我使用智利学前学生的国家行政数据集，来估计基本情况下每个分布十分位数的社会情感发展和体重指数 z 分数的生产函数。适度的平均效应掩盖了父母时间投资回报的显著异质性。社会情感发展分布底部的儿童，投资时间每增加一个标准差，就可以获得多达 0.4 个标准差的收益。类似的增长可以使严重肥胖学生的体重指数降低 0.8 个标准差。有证据表明，高发展得分的儿童不太可能从额外的育儿时间中受益。
