The Impact of Parental Education on Child Health and Development: an Indian Perspective

Using data from the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) 3rd round of surveys for India, this paper studies the possible effects of parental education on prevalence of undernutrition in children between the ages of 0-59 months. The reason why parental education is so important is because enables them to be more aware: education helps increase awareness to various issues (including healthcare). Therefore, higher the education, more the ability to make informed decisions about healthcare, and thereby circumvent issues related to this. This is why parental education is so important: because it is necessary to overcome or circumvent issues of anthropometric failures. Using a linear probability model, while controlling for wealth of the household and other child demographic indicators, the OLS regression results show that there is a negative and significant relationship between parental education and the probability of undernutrition in children in the above-mentioned age group.