Mother's education and early childhood educational care
Betul Akar et al.
Abstract
We analyze the impact of extending mandatory education from five to eight years on mothers’ involvement in early childhood educational activities, using data from the Turkish Time Use Survey. The compulsory education reform substantially increased the likelihood of mothers completing at least middle school (eight years of schooling). However, it had no significant effect on mothers’ time spent on early childhood educational activities, such as reading, playing, and talking to children. Instead, the reform increased mothers’ total time with children, particularly through housework and social activities involving children. These findings suggest that studies linking maternal education to greater time investment in childcare may suffer from omitted variable bias, as unobserved factors like maternal intelligence and values influence both educational attainment and childcare behaviors. Our findings are critical given that nearly half of pre-primary-age children globally are not enrolled in formal education and primarily remain in home settings.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.