Reflexiones y conclusiones del análisis 1 Escalas y disparidades locales

NEP looks to encourage parents to improve cognitive and emotional stimulation of their children by changing parental beliefs and attitudes towards child-rearing, and by improving their mental health and perceived social support. Through these mechanisms, the program is expected to affect long-term outcomes like the home environment, parent-child interaction, and child development. The child develop- ment literature has highlighted two sets of beliefs and expectations: parental beliefs about the best ways to raise children, or the core set of beliefs about the role of parenting, and beliefs of how able parents think they are for child-rearing.

(i) core set of beliefs about the role of parenting and parenting styles. Conditional on the belief that parents can activate actions on parenting, the influ- ential work by Baumrind (1966, 1968, 1973, 1989), also also reviewed by Bornstein (2001), suggest that parents have ideas about raising children that translate into one of three parenting styles: authoritarian, permissive and authoritative. Authoritarian parents exhibit high levels of structure and control in children, many times involv- ing harsh disciplinary strategies, but low levels of warmth and communication. The opposite is thought for permissive parents. Authoritative or democratic parenting combines high and balanced levels of warmth and control and it has been associated with positive child development outcomes. She found that children in authorita- tive homes performed better in standardized tests, were more friendly with peers, more independent and assertive, cooperative with parents, and more achievement oriented. In contrast, children from authoritarian homes were more hostile and/or shy with peers, more dependent on parents, and less achievement-oriented. Chil- dren in permissive homes exhibited very similar patterns as those from authoritarian homes. Baldwin (1948) finds that children from homes with high levels of control and democracy were more cooperative, engaging and curious.

In the context of our intervention, participating parents are challenged to re- visit their parenting styles and mindset about parenting along many dimensions.

Given the promotion of positive parenting is a key objective of the intervention, we expect the NEP to induce program participants to move towards more demo- cratic/authoritative parenting. However, in order to adjust to cultural contexts, we use the baseline survey to adjust the original scales to more suitable measures of the two underlying dimensions of parenting styles.

(ii) beliefs about themselves as parents.

This dimension of beliefs is grounded in social cognitive theory, aligning with Ban- dura (1995)’s theory, in which self-efficacy is “the belief in one’s capabilities to orga- nize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations”. In other words, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in a particular situation. Parents with the same beliefs regarding their children might have different views about their own ability to translate beliefs into practices. Born- stein, Haynes, Azuma, Galperín, Maital, Ogino, Painter, Pascual, Pêcheux, Rahn, and Others (1998) show that high levels of perceived self-efficacy serve mothers to engage more intensely in the parent role investing more effort in parenting.

In our intervention, at least one third of the sessions target at promoting partici- pants self-care and at improving their self-image as parents. In the group dynamics, parents learn to recognize and reinforce their strengths as individuals, how to avoid harsh self-judgement, and discuss some basic strategies that will help them solve daily problems and reduce parental stress. Another important channel by which NEP improves parental self-esteem and perceived self-efficacy is by creating net- works of social support. Usually caregivers participating in the sessions come from very disadvantaged backgrounds with little or none social support. Participants usually create among themselves a supporting network with other parents that face similar problems, that usually remain active after the end of the intervention.

From our baseline data, we find strong associations between SES and beliefs, in line with the literature. Our hypothesis is then to understand whether parental beliefs are at the core of SES gradients in investments and child outcomes widely reported. In fact, our baseline data provides useful insights to this regard. For example, we find that higher SES caregivers tend to be more authoritative, or they tend to combine in a more balanced way warmth and structure ideas about par- enting. Furthermore, they feel more self-competent in the child-rearing task and perceive a higher social support. In contrast, lower SES caregivers tend to be more authoritarian or permissive, perceive themselves less competent as parents, perceive

4 The Role of Beliefs in Parental Investments and Child Development 102 dramatically lower levels of social support and face higher parental stress4_.

iii) Perceived Returns to Investments

We study how subjective expectations about the returns to investments shape behavior. By sharing the personal experiences about parenting within a group set- ting, NEP is likely to raise parental awareness that their actions can affect specific domains of child development. This change is beliefs is an important pathway for sustained change over time, as the awareness of how one’s own parenting affects your child (and the possibility of change) is likely to be internalized with the families even after the short exposure to the intervention.

If parental awareness is shifted as a consequence of the policy, we should observe a shift in the distribution of perceived returns to investments when comparing treat- ment and control groups. Subjective returns to investments will of course depend on whether parents believe intelligence is malleable or fixed, or the belief they can or cannot affect child academic achievement; and whether they believe temperament is malleable or not, or the belief they can affect emotional development. Wentzel (1998) shows that parents who believed that intelligence is malleable also believed they could affect their children academic achievement and had higher educational aspirations for their children. Teti, O’Connell, and Reiner (1996) show that mothers who believe they can or cannot change infant personality or intelligence modify their behavior accordingly. Parents may have a perspective of how fixed vs. malleable intelligence is: the cognitive dimension; or how fixed their personality/temperament is: the socio-emotional dimension.

Manski (2004) argues that the only way to separately identify preferences and subjective beliefs without assuming that people have specific expectations is to di- rectly ask individuals their subjective probability distributions about outcomes. He also argues that subjective expectations should be retrieved in a probabilistic form because: i) probabilities have well-defined scales for responses and are interper- sonally comparable, ii) we can use algebra of probabilities to examine the internal consistency of expectations, and iii) one can compare subjective probabilities with known even frequencies and check for the accuracy of those expectations.

Unfortunately, our psychology-grounded measure on parenting styles and per- ceived self-efficacy, while intended to capture awareness at least partially, are not a good starting point to recover subjective probability distributions. These self- reported scales, while showing high levels of internal consistency, were not built with the purpose of recovering probability distributions so it’s hard to use them to

infer expected returns to parental behavior. Because of this we build on an innova- tive instrument to elicit subjective beliefs about the returns to investments, which was specially built to recover probability distributions in the context of models of parental investments in children like in Cunha, Heckman, and Schennach (2010). The purpose of the instrument, adapted from Cunha, Elo, and Culhane (2013), is to resemble for the case of parental investments in children what has been done in the context of subjective returns to schooling since the 90’s (Jovanovic (1979); Arcidiacono, Hotz, and Kang (2012), and Attanasio and Kaufmann (2009)). The instrument is explained in section 4.5.4