Parenting Promotes Social Mobility Within and Across Generations

Arbeitspapier

This paper compares early childhood enrichment programs that promote social mobility for disadvantaged children within and across generations. Instead of conducting a standard meta-analysis, we present a harmonized primary data analysis of programs that shape current policy. Our analysis is a template for rigorous syntheses and comparisons across programs. We analyze new long-run life-cycle data collected for iconic programs when participants are middle-aged and their children are in their twenties. The iconic programs are omnibus in nature and offer many services to children and their parents. We compare them with relatively low-cost more focused home-visiting programs. Successful interventions target both children and their caregivers. They engage caregivers and improve the home lives of children. They permanently boost cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Participants in programs that enrich home environments grow up with better skills, jobs, earnings, marital stability, and health, as well as reduced participation in crime. Long-run monetized gains are substantially greater than program costs for iconic programs. We investigate the mechanisms promoting successful family lives for participants and find intergenerational effects on their children. A study of focused home-visiting programs that target parents enables us to isolate a crucial component of successful programs: they activate and promote parenting skills of child caregivers. The home-visiting programs we analyze produce outcomes comparable to those of the iconic omnibus programs. National implementation of the programs with long-run follow up that we analyze would substantially shrink the overall US Black-White earnings gap.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 15672

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Demographic Economics: Public Policy ; Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials ; Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation
• Thema: skills ; social mobility ; inequality ; human development

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): García, Jorge Luis ; Heckman, James J.
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (wo): Bonn
• (wann): 2022

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/267409
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ