Impacts of Parental Health on Children’s Development of Personality Traits and Problem Behavior: Evidence from Parental Health Shocks

Parental investments are crucial for the children’s skill development, especially in the early years of the life-cycle. In this paper, we examine how parental health, which may cause variation in investments to children’s skill formation, affects children’s development of specific non-cognitive skills in Germany. Specifically, we observe how significant negative changes to parental health (shocks) occurring early in children’s life affect children’s personality traits and problem behavior measured when the children are approximately six years old. Because of the potential endogeneity of parental health with respect to children’s outcomes, we consider shocks to parental health as a more exogenous source of health variation rather than contemporary levels of health status. Thus, by using significant one period changes in the health variables rather than contemporary levels of health, we hope to identify effects of exogenous changes in health rather than endogenously determined poor health ratings or health deterioration. Our data-base, the “mother and child data” from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), also allows controlling for a variety of variables reflecting the children’s initial skill endowments (for instance birth weight, week of pregnancy at birth, birth order). Additionally, we conduct sensitivity tests across alternative shock definitions and estimate placebo regressions on future parental health shocks to demonstrate the robustness of our results and test our identification strategy. Our results imply that maternal health shocks in early childhood significantly affect children’s emotional symptoms, hyperactivity and neuroticism by the age of six. Paternal health seems to be less relevant for the development of these non-cognitive characteristics. However, we observe that paternal health shocks cause children to be more extraverted.

Morefield, Brant, Andrea Mühlenweg and Franz Westermaier (2011), Impacts of Parental Health on Children’s Development of Personality Traits and Problem Behavior: Evidence from Parental Health Shocks, ZEW Discussion Paper No. 11-049, Mannheim.