Building education resilience through parenting style and out-of-school learning : field experimental evidence from rural Bangladesh

Parents can play a crucial role in children's learning, particularly when children are out of school or during times of school closures. In this study, we evaluate the impacts of two distance educational interventions, which directly involved parents and were delivered via basic mobile phones, on parenting styles and children's cognitive development. Our data come from two randomized control trials (RCTs) administered in rural Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first intervention, volunteers mentored mothers and tutored children over the phone, while in the second one, participating mothers dialed a toll-free number to access prerecorded audio lessons for their children. Findings reveal that both interventions enhance mothers' authoritative parenting style, leading to improved children's standardized test scores. The results highlight the value of scalable and cost-effective phone-based educational interventions in enhancing the parental role in children's human capital acquisition in developing countries.