What Drives Parental Investments in Early Childhood? Experimental Evidence from a Video Intervention in Rwanda

This paper investigates the causal impact of a randomized video intervention designed to study the determinants of parental time investments in early childhood among low-income parents. We designed and screened one video that provided information and conveyed persuasive messages about parental investments, and a second video where we added a positive feedback message. We find that the second treatment improves maternal time investment by 0.2 SD. The provision of information without positive feedback was not enough to shift parental behavior on average but generated important heterogeneous effects among the most disadvantaged households, who benefited the most from both treatments. We explore the potential sources of these changes and document a weak impact of the treatments on parental self-efficacy and knowledge beliefs, but a strong positive effect of the treatments on social support within the community suggesting a potentially important role for social networks in parenting interventions in low-income settings