The Effect of Children's Safety on Parenting Strategy

This paper hypothesizes that disadvantaged parents use more and harsher discipline in part as a rational response to parenting in more dangerous and less forgiving environments. I model parent-child interactions in which altruistic parents modify the behavior of short-sighted children by investing in children's self-control and by punishing misbehavior. In the model, parents choose to devote more resources to punishment when children's misbehavior has more serious long-term consequences. I present empirical evidence in support of this hypothesis by examining the relationship between school safety and parental discipline, finding that parents use harsher discipline when their children attend more dangerous and disorderly schools, even after accounting for neighborhood fixed-effects and a rich set of parent-level controls. Because parents are not directly exposed to their child's school environment, school safety is most likely to influence parents by shaping their concerns about their children's safety, rather than by affecting their stress, mental reserves, or knowledge about effective parenting strategies.