Sarah and Robert LeVine studied the positive effects of schooling on motherhood in developing countries.
By Iris Liu, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Thursday, January 31, 2013
There is a correlation between mothers? childhood education and their ability to interact with health care professionals, husband and wife team Robert and Sarah Levine said in a lecture on Wednesday. The ease with which mothers communicate with health care providers can decrease infant mortality because mothers understand more fully how to care for their children. The researchers? recent book, ?Literacy and Mothering,? analyzes data from four countries to show the association between a woman?s early education and positive health outcomes for both mother and children.
Demographic health surveys conducted in the last several decades indicate that a mother?s schooling significantly impacts her child?s mortality, according to the authors.
An article published in the medical journal Lancet in 2010 established that for every additional year a mother attends primary school, her child?s mortality rate decreases by 10 percent up to age five. Robert LeVine, an anthropology professor at Harvard University, and anthropologist Sarah LeVine furthered these studies by examining how education translates to maternal behavior that affects a child?s health and welfare.
?The question we?re really exploring is, ?How can a few years of schooling, even at bad schools, impact a woman?s maternal behaviors many years later??? Robert LeVine said.
Underdeveloped nations? inadequate schooling systems prevent students from learning substantial material, according to Sarah LeVine.
The LeVines? team included literacy experts and statisticians in order to make a comprehensive and interdisciplinary project.
Robert and Sarah LeVine conducted their study in Mexico, Venezuela, Zambia and Nepal in urban and rural areas and found that socioeconomic background also affects child welfare.
The team found a correlation between a country?s gross domestic product and the proportion of women who received schooling. Those who had not received education interacted with their children poorly and infrequently compared to their educated counterparts. The LeVines found that schooling incrementally but consistently improved young girls? ability to communicate effectively.
In one Mexican community that the team surveyed, they found that influential but uneducated senior women were unable to give coherent narratives of local health crises, while educated but younger women who were lower in the village?s hierarchy could.
Differences in these women?s narrative capacities led to drastically different treatment in hospitals and health care facilities, according to Sarah LeVine.
?These older, uneducated women were being dismissed,? Sarah LeVine said. ?They couldn?t get the doctors and nurses to pay attention to them.?
Robert and Sarah LeVine were initially unable to accurately measure women?s schooling and literacy levels because Spanish literacy tests were unavailable. To collect data, the researchers composed a test based on social studies texts that women would have read if they had attended primary and secondary schools.
Through their studies of women?s literacy levels, the researchers found that educated women were able to internalize classroom teacher-student interactions and apply them to other settings, Sarah LeVine said.
?Educated women were able to behave like pupils while in health care settings,? Robert LeVine said. ?They listened to and followed doctors? advice for themselves and for their children, regardless of whether or not they understood that advice.?
In the home setting, women with schooling adopted a teacher?s role ? talking to and tutoring their children on subjects like health care, according to Robert LeVine.
During the course of their research, the team observed declining fertility and infant mortality in every nation they studied except Zambia. This discrepancy resulted from AIDS, Hepatitis C and drug-resistant malaria epidemics, Robert LeVine said.
?No matter how much schooling the women had, they would go to a clinic and there would be no health measures they could take to improve their situations,? he said.
The LeVines? studies across the four countries revealed that educated women were more likely to follow doctors? instructions and return for follow-up appointments. This behavior led to better parenting and lower infant and child mortality rates, Sarah LeVine said.
Hannah McGehee ?15 said she enjoyed the lecture?s focus on relationships between women?s issues and health in the developing world.
?I don?t think we would ever think how this would affect people raising kids because it?s such a standard here,? she said. ?It?s interesting to see how sending our education system abroad affects the culture.?
Although the studies showed a positive correlation between women?s childhood literacy and later mothering skills, the LeVines acknowledged that larger and longer-term studies will produce more conclusive results.
?Optimally, we would establish the causal influence of literacy on a mother?s ability to interact with health care bureaucracy through following young girls from schooling all the way until motherhood,? Sarah LeVine said. ?But even now, we can definitively say that education does benefit mothers and their ability to care for their children.?
Source: http://thedartmouth.com/2013/01/31/news/literacy
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