How Important is Parental Education for Child Nutrition?

Abstract

Existing evidence on the impacts of parental education on child nutrition is plagued by both internal and external validity concerns. In this paper we try to address these concerns through a novel econometric analysis of 376,992 preschool children from 56 developing countries. We compare a naïve least square model to specifications that include cluster fixed effects and cohort-based educational rankings to reduce biases from omitted variables before gauging sensitivity to sub-samples and exploring potential explanations of education-nutrition linkages. We find that the estimated nutritional returns to parental education are: (a) substantially reduced in models that include fixed effects and cohort rankings; (b) larger for mothers than for fathers; (c) generally increasing, and minimal for primary education; (d) increasing with household wealth; (e) larger in countries/regions with higher burdens of undernutrition; (f) larger in countries/regions with higher schooling quality; and (g) highly variable across country sub-samples. These results imply substantial uncertainty and variability in the returns to education, but results from the more stringent models imply that even the achievement of very ambitious education targets would only lead to modest reductions in stunting rates in high-burden countries. We speculate that education might have more impact on the nutritional status of the next generation if school curricula focused on directly improving health and nutritional knowledge of future parents.

Keywords: parental education; schooling quality; stunting; undernutrition.

Figure A1

Country-level estimates of the average marginal impacts of maternal education on HAZ¹ against stunting rates (Panel A) and grade 5 literacy rates (Panel B). Notes: Average coefficients refer to the average of coefficients for the 7–9, 10–12 and 13 + education brackets for maternal education.

Figure 1

Trends in maternal and paternal education across cohorts and by region. Source: Authors’ estimates from DHS data. See text for details. Notes: These estimates are based on simple means by age-cohort, defined as five-year birth periods. Regional groups are World Bank classifications: ECA = Eastern Europe and Central Asia; MNA = Middle East and North Africa; LAC = Latin America and Caribbean; EAP=East Asia and Pacific; SAS = South Asia; SSA = Sub-Saharan Africa. 1950–54 and 1955–59 cohorts are missing for ECA and SAS because the surveys in these regions were more recent and did not include parents born in these periods.

Figure 2

Stunting prevalence by years of maternal and paternal education. Sources: Authors’ estimates from the DHS rounds listed in Table 1. These are local polynomial smoothing estimates with 95% confidence intervals (CI).

Figure 3

Maternal literacy levels by years of schooling across four developing regions. Notes: Literacy is defined as the ability to read a whole sentence. Regional groups are World Bank classifications: MNA = Middle East and North Africa; LAC = Latin America and Caribbean; SAS = South Asia; SSA = Sub-Saharan Africa. Eastern Europe and Central Asia is excluded because there are very few mothers who have only completed a few years of primary schooling.