Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Background: Parenting practices are comprised of parental attitudes and patterned behaviors that define the parent–child relationship, including parental support and involvement, structure, positive discipline, psychological control, psychical punishment, and other behaviors. The association between parenting practices and child outcomes has been widely studied. The purpose of this study is to examine whether Child Development Accounts (CDAs) can effectively improve parenting practices. CDAs are an economic intervention that offers lifelong accounts for children with information on saving and incentives to save. CDAs provide households a structured opportunity to accumulate assets for children. While CDAs have no direct intervention on parenting practices, it is assumed that CDAs can promote the accumulation of assets for children and, further, that they affect the attitudes and behaviors of parents as well as children.

Methods: Using the data from a CDA experiment in the United States, the study included 2,704 primary caregivers of children born in Oklahoma during 2007: 1,358 were randomly assigned to the treatment group, and 1,346 were assigned to the control group. To treatment participants, the experiment offered a CDA with a $1,000 seed deposit and savings incentives. Participants’ parenting practices were measured at the follow-up survey with six count variables from the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire-Preschool Revision. We used confirmatory factor analysis to generate two latent variables of parenting practices: one for positive parenting practices and another for punitive parenting practices. Two measures of parenting practices then is regressed on the treatment indicator and control variables of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics in the structural equation modeling (SEM) framework.

Results: Two comparable groups were successfully generated from the random assignment, and the treatment and control groups did not differ significantly in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics in the baseline survey. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that, overall, positive and punitive parentage practices have an acceptable model fit. Results from regression analysis suggest that the mean punitive-parenting score among treatment participants was .12 standard deviations smaller than that among control participants (p <. 05). The R-squared change in punitive-parenting caused by the SEED OK intervention was .4%. The treatment–control difference in positive parenting, however, was not statistically significant.

Implications and Conclusion: The results indicated that punitive parenting practices were significantly less frequent among treatment mothers than among control mothers in the CDA experiments. This evidence partially supports the hypothesis that CDAs—an economic intervention encouraging parents to accumulate assets for the long-term development of their young children—affect parenting practices. Compared with other parenting interventions, the size of SEED OK’s effect on punitive parenting is modest yet meaningful. Previous research has indicated that the SEED OK intervention raised parents’ educational expectations, reduced their depressive symptoms, and improved children’s social-emotional development. The current study’s finding on parenting practices is consistent with those treatment effects. Findings from this study add to the mounting evidence that CDAs, an economic intervention designed to build assets for children, have favorable effects on child development and parenting behaviors.