Parental care and cognitive skill development in early childhood

This paper looks at the relationship between child care choices and children's cognitive skills at an early age. The care choices include parental care, center care, relative care and non-relative care. I use children's motor and mental scores at 9 months as a baseline control for their innate ability and their reading and maths scores in kindergarten as outcome measures of cognitive development. My estimates show that non-parental care is related to better scores for children from less-educated households. Further analysis on some parenting activity and parenting style measures shows that reading to children more frequently and a healthy parenting approach have the potential to reduce the parental and non-parental care gap.