Brown Bag Seminar The causal effect of parenting style on early child development

Speaker: Dr Margaret Leighton, University of St Andrews

Abstract: This paper presents causal evidence on the impact of parenting practices on early child development. We exploit exogenous changes in nurturing care induced by a parent training intervention to estimate the impact of nurturing parenting practices on child outcomes. We find a large and significant impact measured at age two; in contrast, at age four, nurturing care has only a modest and imprecisely estimated impact on child outcomes. This change helps explain the fade-out in treatment effects of the intervention between ages two and four, despite ongoing programming and sustained changes in parenting.