PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We use the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate to what extent the number of siblings has an effect on the frequency of cognitively stimulating activities mothers undertake with their children aged 2-3 and 5-6. The resource dilution model assumes that this relationship should be negative. We introduce the resource augmentation hypothesis and argue that increasing sibship size can also have a positive effect when efficiency gains, the public good character of maternal activities, reallocation of maternal time, and child care by older siblings are considered. Our results from intra-individual and between family analyses suggest that resource dilution is unavoidable in large families but that resource-augmenting processes are also at work. The relationship between the number of siblings and activity frequency is not linear and can be reversed from negative to positive in smaller families depending on the presence of younger siblings.