The Causal Impact of Alternative Parental Child Rearing Practices on Adolescent Outcomes

While the role of parenting style as a determinant of adolescent outcomes has a long history in developmental psychology and sociology, determining causality remains a challenge. In this study we estimate the impact of parental discipline and parental monitoring on a variety of risky behaviors. We use information on random assignment to parental training programs to identify the impact of alternative child rearing practices. Our results indicate that increases in parental supervision can reduce risky behavior, whereas the establishment of rules or disciplines has no significant impacts. Further, the estimated impacts are found to increase in magnitude as a child ages. Finally, we find that child rearing practices should be treated as endogenous and that rich data on child rearing practices is needed since many parenting strategies occur simultaneously to identify impacts of independent behaviors. We are grateful to CLSRN and SSHRC for research support. We wish to thank participants at the 2007 Canadian Labour Market and Skills Researcher Network Annual conference for numerous suggestions and helpful comments. We also wish to than Yi Chen for providing exceptional research assistance. The usual caveat applies. School of Policy Studies and Department of Economics, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada, [email protected], 613-533-6692 (phone), 613-533-2135(fax) and NBER.