Who Crowds the Home? Household Composition, Overcrowding, and the Mother--Child Relationship

This paper studies how residential overcrowding relates to parenting during early childhood in Chile. Motivated by a household production framework, we examine whether the consequences of crowding depend not only on the number of people sharing space, but also on who those household members are. We use two waves of the Encuesta Longitudinal de la Primera Infancia (ELPI), a nationally representative longitudinal survey, to analyse three dimensions of the caregiver--child relationship: reported engagement in stimulating activities, directly observed parenting behaviours and emotional warmth, and children's behavioural problems measured through the Child Behavior Checklist. Our main contribution is to distinguish between child crowding and adult crowding. While pooled OLS estimates show broad negative associations between overcrowding and all outcomes, household fixed-effects models substantially attenuate the results for reported stimulation and children's behavioural problems. In contrast, observed parenting remains responsive to within-household changes in crowding. A higher number of children per bedroom is associated with lower caregiver warmth and poorer home environment quality, whereas a higher number of adults per bedroom is associated with better observed parenting outcomes. These findings suggest that residential crowding is not only a matter of density, but also of household composition. They are consistent with a framework in which additional children increase demands on caregivers' time and attention, while additional adults may relax caregiving constraints through support and supervision.