Children from lower-income backgrounds tend to underperform at school compared to their peers from higher-income families. Similarly, children of parents with lower education perform worse than children of higher educated parents. What - apart from genes - can explain this?
It's evident that these demographic groups spend their time with their children differently. However, what of the parents’ actions and behaviors have a significant impact on child development? And is it possible to “nudge” parents toward making specific choices about childrearing? What are the costs and benefits of this approach? And how can we determine what children need to become healthy and productive members of society?
Lecture by Ariel Kalil, followed by conversation.
Ariel Kalil is Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and Director, Center for Human Potential and Public Policy at University of Chicago
Panel:
Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, former Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, and Minister of Education and Research
Torfinn Harding, professor of Economics, University of Stavanger
Moderator:
Solveig Grødem Sandelson, commentator, Stavanger Aftenblad
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By Ariel Kalil
Disadvantaged parents seem to want to do many of the same things as advantaged parents do, for example activities like reading to young children and taking them on educational outings that are associated with more positive child skill development. But economically-disadvantaged parents are less likely to do those things. What can explain this gap between knowing and doing? Like many other decisions, parenting decisions are complex, and parents find decision-making difficult simply because parenting is such a complex area. For this reason, parents are prone to rely on cognitive heuristics (e.g., “shortcuts”) to simplify their decisions and make them “computationally cheap.”
Why do parents rely on “cognitive shortcuts” in their decision-making? And when might this be a problem? One idea is that parenting investments have uncertain returns. The payoff to many parenting decisions does not materialize until years into the future. Decisions about spending money and time on children’s schooling, extra-curricular activities, health-promoting behaviors, and other activities meant to improve child outcomes are decisions about investments with uncertain returns. This can be a problem because research suggests that under these conditions, people systematically overweight present outcomes compared with future outcomes, and this leads to inconsistencies in individuals’ time preferences. This idea, called “present bias,” or “impatience” can cause parents to prioritize spending time on activities that provide immediate gratification rather than investing that time in their children, decisions they may regret once their children have grown up.
A second idea is that parents make some decisions automatically. Parenting often requires quick, on-the-spot decisions. When a child runs towards a busy street, a parent must react rather than contemplate. When a child screams in the checkout lane because the parent says no to his request for candy, there is little time for the parent to reflect on what to do. The need to act quickly and on the spot results in automaticity. Automaticity is a response that occurs with minimal cognitive processing. It is a useful heuristic that reduces the effort in decision making. An automatic response can be beneficial if it is efficacious, but costly when it is not. Because automatic responses can be likened to habits and habits are hard to break, ineffective automatic responses can lead to ineffective parenting.
Given these constraints on decision-making, is it possible to nudge parents toward making better choices for their children? New research suggests the answer is yes. A new type of parenting intervention targets specific, discrete parenting behaviors and, through behaviorally informed actions, addresses the cognitive shortcuts that may prevent parents from engaging in specific parenting practices. In one recent study, researchers tested a behaviorally informed intervention designed to increase the amount of time low-income parents spend reading with their children. Hypothesizing that present bias (or “impatience”) might be key, the researchers designed the intervention specifically to overcome this bias with a specific set of behavioral tools (goal setting, feedback, timely reminders, and social rewards) to “bring the future to the present” and help parents form a habit of regular book reading. These tools were all deployed using text messages, rather than through in-person visits from program staff, to make participating in the program relatively easy for low-income parents with hectic, unpredictable schedules and high levels of daily stress.
On average, the intervention had a very large effect on the amount of time parents spent reading with their children. But even more important was the study’s finding that the intervention was substantially more effective for parents who were more present-biased (or “impatient”) at the outset of the intervention. In short, parents who suffer from present bias are the very ones who benefit from an intervention designed to overcome it. Parents who were not present biased were already reading to their children more frequently and the intervention had little impact on them. These findings suggest that a parent’s failure to read to children is due in part to difficulty making temporal tradeoffs.
Another related study implemented a behaviorally informed field experiment designed to increase attendance and reduce the number of chronic absences at young children’s subsidized preschool programs. This study sent personalized text messages to parents, targeting behavioral bottlenecks driving children’s absences from preschool. According to outcome data from administrative records from preschools, the intervention increased attendance days and decreased chronic absenteeism. The text messages focused on, among other things, correcting parents’ mistaken beliefs about preschool by informing them of their child’s actual number of absences over the prior months and by emphasizing the learning that children miss out on when they are absent. Here, we can think of incorrect beliefs as an informational constraint. The results of the intervention showed that the parents who benefited the most were the ones who reported lower preferences for attendance at baseline. These are the parents who are less likely than others to report that their child would be worse off in terms of academic and social skills if they missed many days of preschool. In short, parents who are less convinced of the importance of preschool benefit most from messages and reminders that emphasize its importance.
We can think of a “better parenting choice” as a choice that reflects parents’ stated intentions. There is a meaningful gap between knowing and doing, and “nudges” can help to close that gap and better align parents’ intentions with their actions.