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Annual Review of Economics

Volume 15, 2023

Parenting Promotes Social Mobility Within and Across Generations

Abstract

This article compares early childhood enrichment programs that promote social mobility for disadvantaged children within and across generations. Instead of conducting a standard meta-analysis, we present a harmonized primary data analysis of programs that shape current policy. Our analysis is a template for rigorous syntheses and comparisons across programs. We analyze new long-run life-cycle data collected for iconic programs when participants are middle-aged and their children are in their twenties. The iconic programs are omnibus in nature and offer many services to children and their parents. We compare them with relatively low-cost, more focused home-visiting programs. Participants in programs that enrich home environments grow up with better skills, jobs, earnings, marital stability, and health, as well as reduced participation in crime. The long-run monetized gains are substantially greater than the costs of the iconic programs. A study of focused home-visiting programs that target parents enables us to isolate a crucial component of successful programs: They activate and promote the parenting skills of child caregivers. The home-visiting programs we analyze produce outcomes comparable to those of the iconic omnibus programs. National implementation of the programs with long-run follow-up that we analyze would substantially shrink the overall Black-White earnings gap in the United States.

Keyword(s): human development, inequality, JEL D13, JEL J13, JEL J18, JEL J24, JEL J31, skills, social mobility
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-economics-021423-031905
2023-09-13
2024-04-25
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Parenting Promotes Social Mobility Within and Across Generations
Annual Review of Economics 15, 349 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-021423-031905
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-economics-021423-031905
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-economics-021423-031905
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