Parental limit-setting decisions and adolescent subject grades

• Published in: Review of economics of the household Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 143 - 171
• Main Authors: Tracey, Marlon R., Holmes, Chanita C., Powell, Marvin G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.03.2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adolescents; Altruism; Autonomy; Child development; Children; Children & youth; Cognition & reasoning; Decision making; Discipline; Economic analysis; Economics; Economics and Finance; Education; Households; Human capital; Labor Economics; Longitudinal studies; Market shares; Microeconomics; Parents & parenting; Population Economics; Risk aversion; Secondary schools; Social Sciences; Success; Parenting; I20; Limit-setting; Z12; Conservative Protestant; Academic grades; J13
• ISSN: 1569-5239; 1573-7152
• DOI: 10.1007/s11150-023-09655-9

Too much decision-making freedom in adolescence might discourage academic effort at the level parents desire since children tend to be less patient and risk-averse. Therefore, many parents limit their child’s choices in order to achieve optimal effort. In this paper, we analyze how limits on autonomy affect a child’s academic effort, gauged by both official transcript and child-reported grades in four core subjects. One empirical challenge is that parents might allow more independent decisions when a child exerts more academic effort, creating a downward bias. Our approach is to employ recursive bivariate models in which community differences in conservative Protestant market share produce external variations in the number of limits. We find US parents limit independent decision-making primarily to reinforce grades in high school English and math, with gains that diminish with the number of limits.