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Maternal Life Satisfaction, Marital Status, and Child Skill Formation

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Abstract

I examine if the documented positive relationship between marriage and child outcomes represents a maternal life satisfaction effect. By treating life satisfaction and marital status as endogenous in the skill production process, I show that there is a distinct happiness and a distinct marriage effect; marriage increases cognitive skills and decreases conduct problems, while maternal happiness increases social and self-regulation skills to an equivalent of up to £ 38,000 per year. Thus, promoting healthy and happy marriages can be more effective than policies that promote marriage, and life satisfaction is an avenue through which non-married mothers can produce high quality children.

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Notes

  1. Frey and Stutzer [2002] find evidence in favor of a causal effect of marriage on life satisfaction as marriage permanently increases happiness, while Easterlin [2003] concludes that there is only partial evidence of a causal effect as marriage only slightly increases happiness.

  2. For mechanisms through which marriage may cause happiness, see Waite and Lehrer [2003]; for mechanisms on how life satisfaction can lead to marriage, see Veenhoven [1997]; and for mechanisms on how marriage can affect child outcomes, see Weiss [1997].

  3. Proto et al. [2011] examine the relationship between happiness, marital status, and child outcomes, but without identifying causal effects. Using an experiment they show that parental divorce does not affect college students’ cognitive skills, and conclude that parental experiences do not pass on through genes to child productivity.

  4. For example, a highly motivated child will perform better on standardized tests compared to an equally cognitive able child but with a lower level of motivation.

  5. S j,t−1 −k reduces the correlation between life satisfaction and unobserved family inputs and skill. Even if the lagged measure of a child outcome does not completely meet the criteria to be a sufficient statistic for past inputs, the vector of these six additional lagged skill measures should be an adequate sufficient statistic for past inputs and endowments.

  6. I include current crime rates to account for the possibility that incarceration rates may be due to a shift of male preferences towards higher criminal behavior, which directly exposes the children to crime in their area. We do not know a priori if mothers will choose the high or low incarceration rate regions as they may choose the amenity of low incarceration rates to have a safer environment for their children, or they may choose the higher incarceration rate region to receive higher compensations for the undesirable unsafe environment.

  7. Only for cohabitation there is evidence that incarceration rates affect differently college graduates and non-college graduates as the difference is statistically significant. However, there are no statistically significant differences for any of the three marital status groups when examining high school dropouts vs high school graduates, and mothers at the lowest 10th percentile of the income distribution vs all other income groups.

  8. Prior studies have documented that there is sufficient variation between marital status and life satisfaction as, on average, 40–50 percent of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by socioeconomic characteristics [e.g., Lykken and Tellegen 1996]. Even though marital status is one of the factors that explain a significant portion of life satisfaction, it is also not the sole characteristic that determines happiness [e.g., Dolan et al. 2008].

  9. The differences are not statistically significant between single and cohabiting or married and divorced for prosocial skills, single and divorced for emotional symptoms, divorced and cohabiting for hyperactivity, and among single, divorced and cohabiting for self-regulation skills.

  10. Northeast, Northwest, Yorkshire and Humber, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of Anglia, London, Southeast, Southwest, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

  11. I also predicted how much the happiness of a single mother would have to change to counteract the effects of marriage on each child outcome. Happiness of single mothers would have to increase by 36.1 percent to offset the beneficial impact of marriage on conduct problems, while happiness would have to increase by 2.668 percent to offset the positive effects of marriage on cognitive skills. This last finding suggests that, since cognitive skills are to a large extent genetically determined, improving maternal happiness would not be the best possible pathway to tackle deficiencies in such skills. The predicted change in happiness is 7.4 percent for emotional symptoms, 26.5 percent for hyperactivity, 49.8 percent for peer problems, 1.2 percent for prosocial behaviors, and 5.6 percent for self-regulation skills.

  12. The positive effect of divorce is consistent with recent findings that divorce increases personal well-being because it removes the individual from a stressful relationship [e.g., Gardner and Oswald 2006; Amato and Hohmann-Marriott 2007].

  13. It is possible that the negative coefficient at age 5 for time spent with children reflects the additional care that children with disabilities may need. Repeating the analysis for a sample of children with disabilities and a sample for non-disabled children, I find that the coefficients of maternal time with the child at age are negative for conduct, emotional, hyperactivity, and peer problems, and positive for the prosocial behaviors and independence. However, the difference in the estimated coefficients were not statistically significant. Therefore, even when we explicitly control for the amount of time the mothers devote to their children based on their disability status there are no significant differences in their time allocation decisions.

  14. In results available upon request I show that maternal skills are a major confounding factor when estimating the effect of maternal life satisfaction on child skills. This finding is in contrast to Berger and Spiess [2011] who report that maternal personality is not a confounding factor for most skills (apart from social skills). However, the estimated effect of maternal life satisfaction on child outcomes is only slightly due to the type of maternal investments, the amount of time the mother spends with her child, parenting practices, and friend networks. The life satisfaction effects decrease conditional on mother–child quality measures (which may reflect the quality of the attachment to the child) with a similar change observed for the quality of spousal relationship (which captures the quality of the familial environment).

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  1. Illinois State University, Department of Economics, Campus Box 4200, Stevenson Hall 425, Normal, 61790-4200, IL, USA

    Dimitrios Nikolaou

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Correspondence to Dimitrios Nikolaou.

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Nikolaou, D. Maternal Life Satisfaction, Marital Status, and Child Skill Formation. Eastern Econ J 43, 621–648 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2015.48

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