Mothers’ Social Status and Children’s Health: Evidence From Joint Households in Rural India

Abstract

The premise that a woman’s social status has intergenerational effects on her children’s health has featured prominently in population science research and in devel-op ment policy. This study focuses on an important case in which social hierarchy has such an effect. In joint patrilocal house holds in rural India, women married to the youn-ger brother are assigned lower social rank than women married to the older brother in the same household. Almost 8% of rural Indian children under 5 years old—more than 6 million children—live in such households. We show that children of lower-ranking moth­ers are less likely to sur­vive and have worse health out­comes, reflected in higher neonatal mortality and shorter height, compared with children of higher-ranking mothers in the same household. That the variation in mothers’ social status that we study is not subject to reporting bias is an advantage relative to studies using self-reported measures. We present evidence that one mechanism for this effect is maternal nutrition: although they are not shorter, lower-ranking mothers weigh less than higher-ranking mothers. These results suggest that programs that merely make transfers to households without attention to intrahousehold distribution may not improve child outcomes.