| The expansion of women's schooling is often asserted to be one of the largest influences on the global fall in child mortality of the past century. While consensus exists that the benefits of maternal schooling for child survival are due to improved health behaviors on the part of mothers, the factors that connect girls' school experience to these behaviors in later life are unclear. This dissertation tested 4 hypothetical connections between schooling and child health in Ethiopia, namely (1) knowledge of treatments for diarrhea and malaria, (2) literacy skills, (3) aspirations that could motivate greater parental investment, and (4) greater wealth and access to medical services among mothers with more education. The research was carried out in the town of Jimma and neighboring rural areas, and included approximately 120 hours of observation in primary schools and an 18-month longitudinal survey of ∼140 children, aged 0-33 months, with varying levels of parental schooling. Children's illnesses, physical growth, and psychomotor development status were used as measures of mortality risk.;Living in rural communities, where there was neither piped water nor easy access to medical services, had larger negative effects on children's health than lack of parents' schooling. Knowledge, literacy, and aspirations showed variable relationships to children's health outcomes: fathers' health literacy appeared to mediate the relationship between paternal schooling and children's weight gain in the urban setting, while mothers' schooling and aspirations for children's development were related to greater weight for age among children in the rural settings. Lower odds of diarrhea among children of mothers with schooling in the rural communities could not be explained by any of the hypothesized mechanisms. In sum, parents' schooling did not exhibit consistent relationships to child health outcomes or to the hypothesized mediators. Community-level factors such as access to clean water and medical services may overwhelm the potential benefits for children's health that might otherwise follow from mothers' schooling. Investments in education should therefore be matched by provision of amenities to underserved communities, and by efforts to reduce the barriers to accessing healthcare faced by marginalized parents and children. |
