"nutrition necessary for his development. Higher the z-score of height for age highercognitive score is expected.? Sex of the child is another factor in determining the cognitive ability in a country likeIndia where preferenceis given to a male child. In India, females are expected to stayat home, do house chores as they are not provided a friendly work environment often.Whereas males are considered as the future earning hand for the family. Thus moreresources are diverted towards education of a male child and their development. So apositive relation between a male child and cognitive scores is expected to arise.? Presence of both parents can also have a significant effect on the cognition of thechild. It is expected that if both the parents are alive then the attention, care receivedby the child is appropriate than the situation in which both the parents are dead.Parents can fulfil all the requirements that are necessary for the development of childi.e. adequate nutrition, proper health facilities etc. It is generally seen that absence ofparents can lead to maternal depression and stress which lowers the mental ability ofthe child.? Mother’s age shares a negative relation with cognitive development of a childbecause with increasing age comes a generation gap which acts as a barrier for both.With time the mothers are rarely able to cope up with the recent advances and thisrestricts her help to the child. ? Birth order affects the child cognition negatively. It is generally seen that higher thebirth order lower will be the cognition of the child. One of the reasons can be: firstchild tends to receive more care and attention than subsequent ones.? A child bought up in an urban locality tends to have higher cognitive skills as thechild is exposed to far better amenities which includes quality education, bettersanitation and health facilities, access to services. However, in rural areas, most often people don’t readily accept the social advances and even if they do, they don’t get thenecessary resources.? In cases where the language of the interviewer and the child matches,the scores tendto be higher. This is because of the convenience that the child experiences whilebeing interviewed. ? As the size of the household increases, the income pie to be divided among eachchild increases and thus the scores decrease. This proves the statement: “Too much ofanything is bad!!! “In our term paper, we have started off by merging two using data sets which was againmerged with master data set. Two of our variables mothers age (agemum) and birth order(order) were accounted for in round 1 of older cohort, so we took up these variables from thedata set of 8-year-old cohorts. In round I, 1008 children were interviewed out of which 14were not interviewed in round II, thus we have dropped these 14 observations.After describing the variables, we tabulated individual variables and thus replaced the onesfor which the values were missing, not applicable or not known with dot. The reason beingthat these unknown observations take unnecessarily large numbers which may give usspurious results. Since we have taken mothers age from round I, which was conducted in2002, and we are dealing with data of 2006, we had to generate a new variable of mothers agetaking into account the four-year increment in the same.Now we move on to generating dummies for the qualitative variables sex, location of thechild, parents alive, language same as interviewer and fathers schooling missing. In each ofthe dummies we take female, rural, single parent or both parents dead, language not same asinterviewer, father schooling given as a reference category.RESULTS:Y = ß + ß mumed + ß daded + ß famiss + ß wi + ß zhfa + ß male + ß bothpar + ß momageij 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 + ß order + ß urban + ß samelang + ß hhsize + e 9 10 11 12 ijIn order to test the significance of the individual households, we set the hypothesis:H ß &ß & ß &ß &ß &ß &ß &ß &ß &ß & ß = 00 = 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 H ß ?0 or ß ?0 or ß ?0 or ß ?0 or ß ?0 orß ?0 orß ?0 orß? 0orß ?0orß ?0or 1 = 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ß ?012"