Does a Couples-Based Financial Literacy and Gender-Transformative Intervention Improve Parenting Practices? Evidence From the ECOVI Cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial in India

Study Overview This sub-study is nested within the ECOVI trial (Disentangling and Preventing Economic Violence against Women), a two-arm cluster RCT evaluating a couples-based financial literacy and gender-transformative intervention ("Let Us Grow Together: Economic Wellbeing for Families") across 150 clusters in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan, India. The sub-study examines parenting practices as an understudied downstream outcome. Parenting questions (s-EMBU-P) are added to the ECOVI endline survey prior to data collection, providing a fully prospective analysis plan. All mediator measures, including IPV types and mental health (GHQ-6), are collected at baseline and endline as part of the main trial. The sub-study pursues four objectives: (1) to estimate whether the intervention effect on parenting operates through relational quality (Relationship channel); (2) through a reduction in IPV (IPV Reduction channel); (3) through improvement in parents' mental health (Mental Health channel); and (4) through financial distress reduction (Financial Distress channel).

Background and Motivation Parenting practices fall into two broad dimensions: negative practices (corporal punishment, inconsistent discipline, poor monitoring) and positive practices (warmth, responsiveness, emotional involvement, active engagement in learning). Negative parenting, particularly harsh physical discipline, is associated with elevated child anxiety, aggression, and long-term deficits in cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Positive parenting serves as a protective factor, buffering children from the adverse effects of household poverty, conflict, and other adversities.

IPV is well-documented as an important driver of parenting quality. Exposure to IPV is associated with declines in nurturance and communication between parents and children and with increases in aggression toward children. Effects of IPV on harsh parenting are partly mediated by parental depression, establishing mental health as a key mechanism linking couple-level violence to parent-child interactions. Notably, most existing evidence focuses on mothers; relatively little is known about how paternal involvement in IPV affects men's own parenting.

Mental health is a central mediating pathway: depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and parenting stress are the psychosocial risks most consistently linked to child maltreatment. Experimental evidence indicates that interventions reducing maternal depression can produce lasting improvements in parenting investments and reductions in child physical abuse, and that mental health fully mediates associations between economic empowerment and child maltreatment.

Gender-transformative couples' programmes have demonstrated reductions in both IPV and violent discipline of children. Key programme features include engaging fathers alongside mothers, addressing marital conflict, and transforming attitudes condoning gender inequality. Evidence from multi-site RCTs demonstrates that such programmes even when parenting is not the primary target can produce lasting downstream improvements in parenting, suggesting that skills in equitable communication and joint decision-making transfer to parent-child interactions.