Download or read book Low Birth Weight and Parental Investment written by Jamie Lynch and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do parents contribute to birth weight disparities in status attainment? This study uses a nationally representative sample of 8,550 children and 1,450 twins from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort to investigate whether, as recent studies have suggested, parents favor healthier children. Children with poor health are found to receive fewer parental investments, including breast-feeding and quality parent-child interaction, but results from between- and within-family regression models, using low birth weight as a proxy for child health, find no evidence that parents compensate for or reinforce child health endowments. Instead, birth-weight disparities in parental investment are linked with observable family, maternal, and child sociodemographic characteristics. Our results shed new light on the broad spectrum of disadvantage faced by children with poor health, and raise doubts about the utility of human capital models to explain birth weight disparities in parental investment.