Using machine learning to study parenting styles

How should we raise our children? Research has shown that the amount of parental time invested is not the only crucial element for children's skill development (Del Boca et al. 2014, Attanasio et al. 2016); parenting style also matters (Fiorini and Keane 2014). Parenting style is a strategic choice linked to incentives (Doepke and Zilibotti 2014). In order to study the relationship between parenting style and child development, researchers rely on ad hoc perceptions or previous research in order to restrict the complexities of parenting to certain key actions. For instance, reading to children has been found to be highly predictive of children's skill development (Kalb and Jan van Ours 2013).