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Urbanization and Daughter-Biased Parental Investment in Fiji

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by National Science Foundation. Dissertation Improvement Grant, BCS-0413900; the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington. I wish to thank the Indo-Fijian study participants, without whom this research would not exist. I would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of Human Nature for their helpful comments on the paper, and particularly my advisor, Donna Leonetti.

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  1. Social Sciences Department, California Polytechnic State University, 1 Grand Avenue, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93407–0329, USA

    Dawn B. Neill

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Correspondence to Dawn B. Neill.

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Neill, D.B. Urbanization and Daughter-Biased Parental Investment in Fiji. Hum Nat 22, 139–155 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-011-9110-z

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