Parental education and children's cognitive development: a prospective approach

Using nationally representative data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), which followed cohort members and their children (N = 1,042, ages 3 to 16), this paper estimates the effect of parental education on children's cognitive development. Previous analyses disregarded selective patterns of family formation, which may introduce endogenous selection bias. In addition, genetic confounding may partially explain the association between parental education and children’s cognitive development. We take advantage of the BC70’s multigenerational design and use inverse probability of censoring and treatment weighting to address non-random selection into parenthood and confounding via parental cognitive ability as a genetic proxy. After correcting for these biases, the effect of parental education on children’s cognitive development is substantially reduced and statistically non-significant.