Urbanization and Daughter-Biased Parental Investment in Fiji

Dawn B. Neill, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

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Copyright ©2011 Springer. The original publication is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12110-011-9110-z.

Abstract

Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children’s productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children’s work activities are compared. Results show higher workloads for older children, rural children, and girls. High scholastic achievement is associated with lower workloads for girls, but not boys. This pattern is interpreted as daughter-biased investment in the context of urbanization.