Summary: Does maternal education have an impact on children’s educational outcomes even at the very low levels found in many developing countries? We use instrumental variables analysis to address this issue in Pakistan. We find that children of mothers with some education spend 72 more minutes per day on educational activities at home. Mothers with some education also spend more time helping their children with school work. In the subset that have test scores available, children whose mothers have some education have higher scores by 0.23–0.35 standard deviations. We do not find support for channels through which education affects bargaining power within the household.

Asim Khwaja

What Did You Do All Day? Maternal Education and Child Outcomes

Tahir Andrabi

Jishnu Das

Citation: Andrabi, Tahir, Jishnu Das, and Asim I. Khwaja. 2011 "What Did You Do All Day? Maternal Education and Child Outcomes." The Journal of Human Resources, 47 (4): 873-912.

Educating women is often viewed as the single most effective policy lever for improving incomes and impacting a wider set of human development outcomes in low-income countries. In their roles as mothers, women also pass on additional benefits of education to their children. This paper contributes to our understanding of such intergenerational links—an important part of the social returns to education. We use primary data from rural Pakistan to examine the difference in child outcomes between mothers with no education (75 percent of mothers in our sample) and those with some education (10 percent report higher than primary education and 15 percent primary schooling or less).

In our analysis, we use the availability of girls’ schools in the mother’s birth village at the time she was of school starting age as an instrument for her education. Because boys cannot attend female schools, this instrument affects only the mother’s education levels rather than the joint education levels of mothers and fathers. Using the instrument allows us to identify variation in maternal education exogenous to ability.

Study Design and Findings

Children of mothers with some education spend more time on educational activities outside of school

Our estimates show a significant impact of some maternal education on child time use at home. Children of mothers with some education (relative to those with uneducated mothers) spend an extra 72 minutes per day on educational activities outside of school hours. In addition, in households with no children above the age of 12 (where the mother is likely the primary caregiver), educated mothers spend an extra 40 minutes a day with children on schoolwork. We also find evidence that mothers with some education facilitate learning by employing other members of the household in helping in education and reading to children by an extra 4.64 hours per week.

Maternal education also has a significant impact on child test scores

Furthermore, our results show that some maternal education also has a significant impact on child test scores – children of mothers with some education report test scores between 0.23 and 0.35 standard deviations higher than those who do not. It should be noted that this result required controlling for additional selection issues for the subset of children in our sample who took the test.

These differences are unlikely to arise from extra leverage possessed by educated mothers

We present supporting evidence that these effects are unlikely to arise from additional leverage “educated” mothers might have in the household’s decision-making process, particularly on decisions that directly affect the child, such as enrollment. We do not find evidence for increased bargaining power due to maternal education. Nor do we find any impact on child outcomes that are more likely to require household-level (joint) decision-making. Maternal education does not increase spending on child-specific goods, and we are unable to detect an effect of maternal education on child enrollment, although the latter could also be due to a lack of precision in our enrollment estimates.

While we do not find a significant impact of education on maternal bargaining power or child enrollment, our results show that even a small amount of maternal education can have a large effect on child cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes relative to the comparison group of mothers with no education through the channel of time usage. The findings in this paper emphasize the role of parental-child interaction and child effort in studying as an important channel for improving learning. The paper also demonstrates that one way to overcome the difficulty in capturing non-labor market returns to female education, particularly the intergenerational transmission of education, is through examining the application of time use data in household surveys.

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As a condition of use, please cite as: Andrabi, Tahir, Jishnu Das, and Asim I. Khwaja. 2011 "What Did You Do All Day? Maternal Education and Child Outcomes." The Journal of Human Resources, 47 (4): 873-912.

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