Highlight: Randomized parenting intervention that improves parents' discipline strategies (parenting style) for their children in early childhood improves the children's behavioral outcomes in early adolescence. Parenting styles (harsh discipline, positive discipline) have causal effects on child outcomes. 

Highlight: Randomized parenting intervention that improves parents' discipline strategies (parenting style) for their children in early childhood makes the children less likely to bully their peers in early adolescence. Bullying seems distinct from other problematic behaviors. 

Highlight: AI-based assistance to tutors (service providers), providing them with analyses and guidance on tutoring their students, improves students' outcomes (service outcomes). Not all tutor adopt the assistance technology, and those who eagerly adopt do not always benefit more. 

Highlight: Children's screen time during the COVID-19 pandemic is positively associated with parents' depression, parents' lack of self-care, family conflict, and parents' fear of the pandemic. Whereas previous literature primarily focused on the effects of parenting behavior, we find important roles played by complex family factors in determining children's screen time. 

Highlight: Consumption of single-person households, especially in 50--65 age group and in spending related to formal and informal insurance mechanisms, was negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Single-person household is highlighted as a growing demographic group that is particularly vulnerable to economic shocks because of their limited access to informal insurance.

Highlight: Workers working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to experience loneliness, lethargy, and sadness, especially if they were also responsible for housework, but not if they lived with children.  We suggest work-family facilitation as a potential explanation. 

Highlights: 

• We find negative birth order effects among children in contemporary China.

• Effects are on academic achievement, parental supervision, and harsh punishment.

• Parenting behaviors are important in explaining the effects.

• Home environment in China may have evolved from those of previous generation.

Highlight: CES skill production function is estimated using panel data following students through middle and high school, finding greater elasticity of substitution for the earlier period. For under-achieving students, own effort dominates household income and school quality as the key input. 

Abstract

Bullying starts in early childhood, and parents play an important role in shaping problematic behaviors of children. Improving parenting in early childhood, therefore, may be an effective strategy to reduce children’s bullying aggression in the long term. Few bullying prevention programs target the early childhood period, however. This chapter presents the effects of Triple P (Positive Parenting Program) on children’s bullying aggression at 10-year follow-up. Parents of young children received education and training on children’s development, positive parenting, and discipline strategies in a randomized, universal, group-based parent training intervention. Unlike earlier studies that showed that parenting intervention could reduce early childhood bullying, the current study examined bullying aggression during adolescence, when children were 10–14 years old. The results show lower levels of physical bullying reported by children, primarily boys, whose parents received Triple P training. Verbal bullying and victimization were unaffected. These findings suggest that early childhood parenting intervention can reduce adolescent bullying aggression.

Highlight: We find peer effects on personality skills of primary school children, showing that peers are inputs in childhood noncognitive skill development. Children's characteristics that determine their own personality skill development determine their peers' personality skills but not their academic achievement, suggesting that peer effects may be skill-specific.

Highlight: We show that parents in the US spend more time taking care of their children when they have legal access to medical marijuana. We provide  suggestive evidence that the parents used marijuana for medical purposes as intended rather than engaging in marijuana abuse. 

Highlight: Exposure to ambient cold temperature during the first year after birth has negative effects on children's cognitive development observed at ages 3--5 (but not before). Caregivers do not mitigate these impacts but channel/amplify it instead by decreasing  caregiver-child interactions and material investments into home environment. 

Highlight: School reopening in the fall of 2020 in the US had heterogeneous impacts on the time allocation of parents, widening the existing socioeconomic gap among households. Hybrid or in-person reopening was disruptive to all households while online reopening was disruptive only to low-SES households.  

Highlight: Single-sex schooling can improve students' outcomes only if the students do not face intense competitive pressure for academic performance. Because of this, single-sex schooling effects may be negative for some female students even though the effects are positive on average.

Highlight: Parents' exposure to the Great Famine of China in childhood negative impacts the adult mental health of their children. The effects are concentrated in exposures during ages 0--2 and 3--7, the first two stages of Jean Piaget's cognitive development model.

An effective Chinese family planning policy called "Later, Longer, and Fewer" widened gender gap in breastfeeding duration. Parents affected by the policy engaged in son-biased fertility stopping, skewing the gender ratio among the last-born in the family who receive longer breastfeeding than the earlier-born children regardless of gender.

Highlight: We show that people are strongly motivated by loss aversion in prosocial motives in the context of vaccination decisions, as measured by both intentions to vaccinate and vaccine take-up. We calibrate prosocial loss aversion parameter to be around 2. 

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Highlight: Parents' choice of discipline (parenting style; positive vs. harsh discipline) is driven by their ability to communicate their message to their children through discipline (parenting skill). Positive discipline is more consistent, easier for children to understand, but more difficult for parents to implement. Parenting skill is found to be an important determinant of achievement gap of children across household SES.

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