title: Is biology destiny? Birth weight and differential parental treatment.
abstract: Time diaries of sibling pairs from the PSID-CDS are used to determine whether maternal time investments compensate for or reinforce birth-weight differences among children. The findings demonstrate that the direction and degree of differential treatment vary by mother's education. Less-educated mothers devote more total time and more educationally oriented time to heavier-birth-weight children, whereas better-educated mothers devote more total and more educationally oriented time to lower-birth-weight children. The compensating effects observed among highly educated mothers are substantially larger than the reinforcing effects among the least-educated mothers. The findings show that families redistribute resources in ways that both compensate for and exacerbate early-life disadvantages.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, Queens College, City University of New York, NY, USA. amy.hsin@qc.cuny.edu
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hsin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001724:Birth Weight; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013997:Time Factors