Just give them childcare: The COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment in parenting practices.

Just give them childcare: The COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment in parenting practices.

Joshua Hartshorne

Working paper

PsyArXiv

2021

Correlations between parenting practices and child development outcomes are as established as anything in human behavior. Their causes remain controversial. Parenting practices are confounded with culture, socio-economic status, and genetics. As a general rule, randomized controlled experiments are impractical if not impossible. We use the COVID-19 pandemic school reopenings as a natural experiment to address this gap. A number of studies showed that the advent of the pandemic affected families negatively affected families. Prior work tied increased child recreational screen time and decreased parent mental health specifically to school and daycare closures (rather than work-at-home policies, unemployment, fluctuating COVID rates, etc.). However, losses are different from gains, and just because losing childcare hurts families does not mean increasing childcare will help them. We use the fact that schools reopened at different times and to different degrees across the country, showing that return to in-person schooling decreased child recreational screen time and improved parent mental health. Again, we rule out potential confounds like work-from-home policies, COVID rates, and unemployment. The results indicate that addressing childcare gaps may be critical to improving child and family well-being.