The effect of parental smoking on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2021.100978Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Parental smoking results in lower cognitive outcomes in children.

  • Smoking behaviour is also associated with worse developmental outcomes.

  • Children’s physical health and school attendance are potential mediators.

Abstract

Economic research emphasises the importance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in children for long-term labour market, health and social outcomes. In contrast to previous studies that focus on the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy, we contribute to the literature by examining whether parental current smoking impacts on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development. We exploit data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and address potential endogeneity and self-selectivity bias using robust estimation methods. Overall, we find evidence that parental smoking results in worse development outcomes in children. Specifically, our fixed-effects estimates indicate that children living with parents who are smokers exhibit lower cognitive outcomes ranging between 0.09 and 0.17 standard deviation, while the impacts on non-cognitive outcomes range between 0.06 and 0.80 standard deviation. We also provide insights on some of the mechanisms of transmission. Our findings suggest that campaigns, programs and policies that reduce tobacco consumption may have positive externalities in terms of improving children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, and long-term labour market outcomes.

Introduction

Early cognitive and non-cognitive development is crucial for long-term outcomes in children. While the link of cognitive skills (i.e. intellectual and reasoning abilities) with social and economic success is well established in the literature (Zax and Rees, 2002; Blau and Kahn, 2005; Lin et al., 2018), more recently the role of non-cognitive skills (i.e. adaptive personality traits, and social and emotional skills) in determining educational performance, occupational attainment and earnings has also attracted a lot of attention from social scientists (Kuhn and Weinberger, 2005; Heckman et al., 2006; Lindqvist and Vestman, 2011). A growing body of literature has evolved to examine the production function of cognitive and non-cognitive skills (Cunha and Heckman, 2008), some focussing on the intergenerational transmission of such skills from parents to children (e.g. Anger and Heineck, 2010; Björklund and Jäntti, 2012; Grönqvist et al., 2017), others exploring the role of environmental factors including socioeconomic status, and home and school learning environment in the production process (e.g. Violato et al., 2011; Carlsson et al., 2015; Balsa et al., 2018; Orgill-Meyer and Pattanayak, 2020).

We contribute to this body of literature by examining the effects of parents’ smoking behaviour on their children’s cognitive and non-cognitive achievements. Smoking is one of the primary risk factors of disease and disability globally (WHO, 2009). In Australia, tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable burden with approximately 14 % or 2.6 million Australians aged 15 and older smoking tobacco daily (ABS, 2018). While the direct health effects of tobacco consumption on smokers are obvious, exposure to second-hand smoke, particularly in children, is associated with a number of poor health outcomes, including asthma and other respiratory conditions, otitis media, and conductive deafness (Öberg et al., 2011; Been et al., 2014). Maternal smoking during gestation has a particularly adverse impact on children’s health, increasing risks of intrauterine growth, spontaneous abortion, pre-term birth and low birth weight (Horta et al., 1997; Chiolero et al., 2005). However, we know little about whether parental smoking in the growing years of a child affects their development. Using data from a longitudinal study that tracks children from birth, this paper explores whether parental current smoking affects their children’s human capital development measured at different stages in their early life.

Several attempts have been made in the economic literature to understand the relationship between tobacco consumption, household expenditure and children’s outcomes. A number of studies have investigated the crowding-out effect of tobacco expenditure on food items and showed a decrease in both quantity and quality of food consumed in poorer households (Busch et al., 2004; John, 2008). More recent studies have explored the effects of smoking on children’s health outcomes specifically. Policies such as a rise in cigarette tax and smoking bans have been found to affect children’s anthropometry, reduce the number of sick days and improve birth outcomes in children (Nonnemaker and Sur, 2007; Mellor, 2011; Settele and Van Ewijk, 2018; McGeary et al., 2020). Our interest lies in the effect of smoking on other dimensions of children’s development, particularly cognitive outcomes as measured by their literacy and numeracy ability, and non-cognitive outcomes using measures of their behavioural skills and problems. While there is a significant literature in the medical, epidemiological and psychological literature to examine such relationships, the evidence is often based on, data non-representative of the broader population, and basic statistical methods (Julvez et al., 2007; Herrmann et al., 2008). More importantly, a vast majority of these studies focus on the consequences of in-utero exposure to maternal smoking (Lassen and Oei, 1998; Wehby et al., 2011; Simon, 2016) while our interest lies in the effects of parents’ current smoking. We contend that parental smoking can affect their children’s development not only through their initial stock of health at birth, but also through other pathways including early childhood ill-health, tobacco spending and parents’ own well-being.

The role of parental investments in cognitive and non-cognitive skill formation has been explored from various perspectives in the economic literature, for example maternal employment (Bernal, 2008), time investment (Neidell, 2000), the quality of parent-child relationship (Coneus et al., 2012) and using measures of quality and quantity of stimulation and support available to a child in the home environment (Todd and Wolpin, 2007). Risk factors such as parental consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs have been linked to their offsprings’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes (Chatterji and Markowitz, 2001; Nilsson, 2017; Mangiavacchi and Piccoli, 2018), with a focus on adolescents and young adults. For instance, maternal illicit drug use is found to be a significant predictor of children’s behaviour problems (Chatterji and Markowitz, 2001), and mother’s excessive alcohol consumption during childhood is negatively associated with their children educational and labour market outcomes (Balsa, 2008; Mangiavacchi and Piccoli, 2018).

Our study makes an important contribution to the existing literature. Using the Longitudinal Study of Australia Children (LSAC), a multi-year cohort survey of children focussing on their development and wellbeing, and a range of measures of cognitive and non-cognitive performance, we investigate the effect of parental current smoking in their children early life. We also discuss the different channels of transmission of parental smoking on children’s developmental1 outcomes and test two of those mechanisms, in particular, child physical health and school attendance. We believe that parental smoking results in worse physical health in their children and therefore higher school absenteeism. Chronic physical illness in children can also directly affect their mental well-being. Childhood ill-health may therefore impact on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

One aspect of our modelling that deserves due attention is selection bias. Smoking is prevalent in lower socio-economic groups whose characteristics (lower IQ, lower levels of human capital, poorer motivation etc.) will be correlated with lower cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in children (Case et al., 2002). Even after controlling for a wide range of observed family characteristics that the LSAC provides, the identification of the effects of parental smoking on children's human capital development may suffer from potential endogeneity resulting from unobserved heterogeneity and self-selection. We address such endogenous selection by using empirical methods such as fixed-effects and instrumental variables. Overall, our results suggest that parent(s)’ smoking behaviour leads to worse outcomes in children’s cognitive and non-cognitive performance. Specifically, we find that children whose parents are smokers have lower test scores and more behavioural issues. Our results are robust to a number of smoking measures, and model specifications. Our findings, including evidence on the pathways, highlight the role and contribution of family environment, parental smoking in this instance, in achieving higher human capital in children, conducive for improving long term social and economic success.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the theoretical motivation and outlines the empirical strategy used to estimate the impact of parental smoking on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. We describe the data used in this analysis in Section 3. The results are discussed in Section 4 and Section 5 provides the conclusion.

Section snippets

Theoretical motivation

Our work is underpinned by theoretical models of skill formation and household production of child human capital developed in the literature (Leibowitz, 1977; Cunha and Heckman, 2008). Using such frameworks, many empirical studies have confirmed the role of parental investment (Neidell, 2000; Coneus et al., 2012; Fletcher and Wolfe, 2016; Anger and Schnitzlein, 2017) in child cognitive and non-cognitive development.

Our study focuses on the influence of parental smoking behaviour in the

Data

Our main data is derived from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). The LSAC is a biannual survey that began in 2004 and follows two cohorts of children: one born in the period March 1999–February 2000 (4983 children) and another born in the period March 2003–February 2004 (5107 children). In this study, we use the latter group, also known as the ‘B cohort’, which is drawn randomly from all registered national births at the start of the survey.3

Main findings

As a starting point we estimate Eq. (1) using pooled OLS. Our sample of children in waves 5–7 whose NAPLAN and PPVT scores are matched with the LSAC survey. Table 1 (panel A) shows the impact of parental smoking on the six different measures of children’s cognitive development and in Table 2 (panel A) we report effects on children’s non-cognitive outcomes. Focusing on Table 1, with all six outcomes of cognitive development, we find significant negative effects of parental smoking. The effects

Conclusions

A fairly large literature across a range of disciplines, including economics, psychology, epidemiology, sociology, education, and demography, has been devoted to understanding family influences on child development. Given the importance of early childhood development for long-term social and economic success, understanding the determinants of children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development is imperative. The role of parental investment in cognitive and non-cognitive skill formation has been

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

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