Early childhood, agency, and capability depreviation - A quantitative analysis using German socio-economic panel data

Abstract

From a capability perspective early childhood is a very important, special stage in human life. It is important because functionings achieved in this early phase of life have been shown to substantially determine future capabilities. It is special because – more than in other stages of life – it depends very much on other people’s agency whether a young child has most important capabilities and can develop a number of crucial functionings. In this paper we analyze how functionings and capability deprivation in early childhood are influenced by the characteristics of other persons’ agency. The agency of those who care for a small child will depend on the goals of these adults, determined by the question of how important advancing the well-being of the children is for them. However, exercising, e.g. parental, agency is not only driven by parents ’ personal goals and willingness but also by individual means and by their personal and social conversion factors that constitute their agency freedom. This is so, because effectively exercising agency requires – inter alia – time, education, child care facilities, and income that may restrict the ability to exercise one’s agency. To empirically assess the interplay of others’s agency and functionings or capability deprivation in early childhood we use a recent extension of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) data for children aged zero to three years. We assess the situation of 1,067 babies that were born in Germany between 2002 and 2006 as well as the follow-up results for 457 children who were two or three years old in and after 2005. Besides income poverty we analyze social opportunities like access to health care of children as measured by the participation in preventive medical examinations for infants, the early childhood stimulation that a child gets as well as his or her social participation. Although income poverty and deprivation in the childrens’ health care and education are highly correlated, our findings based on logistic regression analyses, suggest that it is first of all the household type and the mother’s educational degree that affect the childrens’ functionings. Especially children of single mothers face, besides a high risk of income poverty, a risk of being deprived of health care and early childhood stimulation. Additionally, children of mothers with a low educational degree have significantly lower opportunities to be advanced in their early education while the fact that a mother who is not employed during her childrens’ early childhood increases the childrens’ chance of personal care and support. Although household income differs remarkably between households with children, income variables do not explain differences in social participation and contacts of the children that depend more on the time that can be spent with each child. The time children were cared for away from home did not have any effect on the analyzed functionings.