Children's skills: the crucial role of interactions with parents

Widely explored by disciplines such as medicine and psychology, the acquisition of cognitive and social skills remains little-known territory for economists. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman paved the way by theorising a model of human capital to be developed from childhood. It shows that investing resources in young children has a better return than at any other stage of life.

In his article « Child Development in Parent-Child Interactions » published in the Journal of Political Economy, researcher Avner Seror looks at the interactions between parents and their children, the development of the youngest children and the impact of exposure to screens

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Dialogues économiques is a digital magazine published by the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMU, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Méditerranée) A bridge between academic research and society, Dialogues économiques provides all citizens with the keys to economic reasoning. Articles are published every two weeks.

Attachment theory

Parent-child interactions have been the subject of numerous theories in developmental psychology. One of the best known comes from the psychiatrist James Bowlby, who introduced the theory of attachment in the late 1960s. This theory is based on the idea that a young child needs to develop an attachment relationship with at least one person who cares for him on a consistent and ongoing basis, a caregiver. Through care, tenderness and positive reactions, a parent enables her child to construct mental representations of himself as a loved and competent being. These mental representations shape children's non-cognitive, or socio-emotional, skills by increasing their motivation to learn and explore their environment.