Convincing the Mummy-ji: Improving Mother-in-Law Approval of Family Planning in India

Family, as the most basic social institution in the world, has been of longstanding interest to researchers and policymakers alike. Studies of family structure in developed societies have predominantly examined kinship and intrafamilial ties within nuclear family settings, with an extensive literature devoted to marital and parent–child relationships. In contrast, relationships within nonnuclear family structures have received considerably less attention, particularly in developing countries where strong extended family ties are prevalent.

One such nonnuclear relationship is that between mothers-in-law (MILs) and daughters-in-law (DILs), which is of particular importance in South Asian settings where women move into their husbands’ (often extended) households following marriage. In these patrilocal-patrilineal societies, a woman’s MIL, as the likely matriarch of the household, plays a crucial role in determining her mobility, access to services and resources outside the home and overall well-being.

In a new study published in the American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings, Mahesh Karra and colleagues focus on interactions between MILs and DILs related to fertility and family planning in rural Uttar Pradesh, India. They first document the extent to which fertility preferences are misaligned between women and their MILs. They then evaluate the impact of a randomized intervention that provided women with vouchers for subsidized family planning services on their ability to engage with their MILs on a sensitive and private topic like family planning and on their MIL’s approval of family planning.

Main findings:

• The authors find evidence of greater misalignment in fertility preferences between a woman and her MIL as compared to her husband. Consistent with this finding, MILs are also less likely than husbands to approve of women’s family planning use.
• The intervention that provided women with vouchers for subsidized family planning services improved their MIL’s approval of family planning, especially for MILs who were more likely to have limited their DIL’s access to family planning, namely women who did not have a son, whose MILs wanted them to have more children than they themselves wanted and who were from poorer households.
• Finally, the voucher enabled DILs to initiate discussions about family planning with their MILs, potentially serving as a channel for the positive effect of vouchers on MIL approval.

Given the central role of MILs in countries where extended households are common, the results suggest that interventions that aim to improve women’s welfare would benefit from engaging MILs in addition to husbands. MILs can act as gatekeepers and can prevent their DILs from using family planning services due to discordant fertility preferences. More broadly, the findings underline the importance of household structure and intrahousehold relationships that extend beyond the nuclear family framework when designing interventions to improve women’s well-being.