Evaluating the impact of mothers’ self-esteem on early childhood home environment: Evidence from the NLSY

Abstract

Estimating causal effects of parental characteristics on determinants of child outcomes is complicated due to endogeneity problems. Utilizing matched mother-child data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, this paper integrates an orthogonalization technique to 2SLS-IV regressions. The key findings indicate that a rise in mothers’ self-esteem improves children’s home environment conditions that promote cognitive and emotional developments, with larger effects observed among mothers in socio-economically disadvantaged families. The magnitude of these effects are either higher than or comparable to the effects of mothers’ education and cognitive ability. Additionally, we find that a rise in mothers’ self-esteem improves children’s reading abilities.