Child development in parent-child interactions

In the paper, I introduce a theoretical model of how parent-child interactions impact child development. My approach is rooted in developmental psychology. It is based on the idea, first introduced by John Bowlby, that through care, sensitivity, and positive feedback, a parent enables her child to build mental representations of himself as loved and competent. These mental representations shape the child’s noncognitive skills by increasing his motivation to learn and explore his surroundings. Hence, the parent’s interactions with the child create a fundamental complementarity in the formation of cognitive and noncognitive skills. As the child learns from the parent, he forms cognitive skills while acquiring noncognitive skills that increase his motivation to further learn.

This model explains the evidence from a vast literature, at the same time generating new insights. First, the model provides a single unifying explanation for well-known properties of the production function of skills. It is well established that (a) skills are selfproductive, (b) noncognitive skills foster cognitive skills, and (c) there is a dynamic complementarity between early and later investments. All these properties can be explained by the mechanism of the model.

Beyond the established properties of the production function of skills, I show that a child who increases his noncognitive skills by interacting with his parent is better equipped to learn from his surroundings. This prediction echoes the celebrated first experiments that enabled generations of psychologists to classify different types of parent-child relationships, depending on children’s observed behavior. Indeed, a child’s exploration of his surroundings while his parent is absent reflects a secure attachment to the parent, which is built through the parent’s care, sensitivity, and positive feedback. Conversely, limited exploration reflects a parent-child relationship where the child is insecurely attached to the parent.

I also use this model to study the effect of early exposure to the media devices that are ubiquitous in most economies. There is a growing consensus that early media exposure is negatively associated with a variety of child outcomes. This negative association is not straightforward, since media devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) stimulate children and can often foster substantial learning through game apps or educational content. Additionally, children growing up in more disadvantaged families appear to be particularly exposed to media devices. The model provides an intuitive explanation for these phenomena. First, I find that parents expose their children to media devices as a substitute for their own caring effort. The more a child is exposed to media devices, the less effort he puts into learning from the parent. Thus, he is less able to see himself as competent and loved, he acquires less noncognitive skills, and he becomes less motivated to further learn from his surroundings. Second, according to the model, a parent’s caring effort is less likely to be replaced by early exposure to media devices when the parent has “better” characteristics, which implies that such exposure can amplify child development inequalities.