Does your parents’ education affect your well-being? Evidence from an educational reform in England

A 2007 United Nations Children’s Fund and an OECD report comparing child well-being across 21 industrialized nations, placed the UK at the bottom of the rankings for measures of children socio-emotional well-being (SEW). In addition to being important for health, SEW relates to the “Big 5” personality traits and non-cognitive skills which are key predictors for later life employment opportunities.

This paper evaluates the effect of parental education on children socio-emotional skills. I use a rich cohort dataset, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) containing measures of SEW such as the Strengths and Difficulty Questionnaire (SDQ) from 4 to 13 years old. I exploit the fact that a proportion of the parents in ALSPAC were impacted by the most recent raising of the minimum school leaving age (RoSLA) in England which occurred in 1972. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design, the structure of the ALSPAC data allows me to identify the causal impact of the policy separately from the effect of parents age at the time of the child’s birth.

Theoretical work on the skills production function by Conti and Heckman, Cunha and Heckman, and others suggest that an individual’s skills are multi-dimensional and comprise socio-emotional skills in addition to cognitive skills. There is a dynamic technology of skill formation function that depends, amongst other inputs, on parental investments. As early life SEW improves both SEW throughout the lifecourse and impacts the productivity of future investments, this model suggests that parental education may be more impactful than other late-life interventions.

This paper relates to two strands of the economics literature. The first strand examines the determinants of non-cognitive abilities and socio-emotional skills. The majority of these studies have focused on the role of parental income using measures of permanent income or exogenous intervention-related household income shocks. They find that income has a cumulative positive effect on non-cognitive skills which increases as the cohort ages. Likely mechanisms are improvements in parent-child relationships. The second strand of the literature investigates the effect of parental education on children’s outcomes such as education, health and cognitive skills finding effects that are visible at older ages.

I contribute to both strands of the empirical literature. Compared to the non-cognitive skills literature, I consider a previously overlooked component of the non-cognitive skills production function, parental education, and exploit a natural experiment. My paper is the first to investigate the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills in a large cohort study in the UK. I consider the mechanisms through which parental education might affect children socio-emotional skills including assortative mating, earnings and better information on parenting skills. I also consider whether the effect varies across the parental educational distribution and depending on the gender of children.

Very preliminary results indicate that parental education improve children socio-emotional skills. This effect is stronger for the children of parents who would have not stayed in school longer. There is no difference between children’s gender, but one likely mechanism is parenting skills and time spent reading to children.