Parental Socioeconomic Background and Child Behaviour

Abstract

Although childhood obesity has long been in focus, little is known about the sensitivity of behavioural choices to measure parental resource constraints. The aim of this study is to examine the heterogeneous effects of children’s (or their parents’) choices of lifestyle subject to information and resource constraints, respectively. We address this issue using a unique longitudinal data set of almost 1,500 schoolchildren attending state schools between 2008 and 2010 in the Danish Municipality of Aalborg. One empirical strategy is to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics; another is to use child fixed effect to control for fixed unobserved child characteristics. By including the interaction between child behaviour and parental socioeconomic background, a more complete but more complex picture arises. Our findings challenge the predominant assumption that behaviour and weight is a choice made by children, or their parents.