Mother's effective literacy status: Implications on child health

Mother's effective literacy status has instrumental importance in affecting child's health outcomes. This is not to dismiss the relevance of a father's literacy, but to posit a primitive that the father's literacy is by-and-large channelled through the mother. Having said that, the current analysis is an attempt to capture the impact of mother's effective literacy status (mother has the advantage of dual literacy - her own and that of the child's father, mother is literate but the child's father is illiterate, mother is proximate illiterate by being in proximity to the child's father who is literate, mother is secluded illiterate as neither she nor the child's father are literate) on child health outcomes. To begin with, we use Triplots to depict the percentage of children under 5 years of age with severity of anaemia, stunting, wasting and underweight for different effective literacy status of mother in India. Further, multinomial logit model is used to examine the effect of mother's effective literacy status on children below 5 years of age for rural and urban India. The results show that, compared to mother's secluded illiteracy, mother being proximate illiterate, literate alone or dual literate affect child health significantly for all the four health indicators in rural areas and for stunting and underweight in urban areas. Further, the effect of mother's dual literacy status is more pronounced than when literate alone, which is higher than when she is proximate illiterate. We further test for the differential effect of effective literacy status of mother with respect to the gender of the child and the level of education of the literate parent. It is also observed that that higher level of education of the literate parent is associated with lower log-odds of the child being unhealthy vis-…-vis healthy in both rural and urban areas.