Influencing child happiness and development

In recent research, I looked at data on German mothers and children with a colleague and, using economic tools of analysis, we uncovered a number of findings that could be relevant to either the policy or practice of child-rearing.

Much is already known from psychological research, but using economic methods gives us the opportunity to either support well-known findings using different methods or derive novel insights from these newer methods, and we think our study, which looked at more than 800 German children and their interactions with parents, does a bit of both.

ACTIVITY INVOLVEMENT

While economic factors can make a vital contribution to child development, money is by no means everything. The dataset that we used allowed us to produce models of ways in which income affects the activities that are offered to children: in some cases, such as painting, reading and play, the connection to income is positive, but this is not the case for all activities, as the negative relationship between income and watching TV and shopping illustrates. The particular situation a parent finds themselves in is a key determinant of what is right and matters to people, and of course parents should not feel guilty about the choices they have to make to keep a family afloat.