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