How do fathers influence early childhood development? Insights from low- and middle-income countries

What role do fathers currently play in parenting young children in low- and middle-income countries? What difference would it make if they did more?
Policymakers are increasingly focused on promoting early childhood development. Policy interventions are often reliant on parental involvement, but typically only target mothers, who traditionally provide most of the care for children in early years. This episode of VoxDevTalks explores the role that fathers play, and asks what difference would it make if they did more, and how could policy incentivise them to do exactly that? David Evans and Pamela Jakiela talk to Tim Phillips about the benefit of involving fathers in early childhood development, but also how adapting parenting programmes to involve fathers isn’t straightforward.
For more episodes of #VoxDevTalks, along with columns featuring other cutting-edge development economics research, check out our website: voxdev.org/.
#parenting #father #earlychildhoodeducation #economicdevelopment #policy #research #economics