Testing the Effect Pathways of Parental Absence: Long-term Educational Outcomes of Children of Labor Migrant Fathers in Gansu, China

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Thurseday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Education implications of internal migration: a global perspective and lessons from the Chinese case

Proposal

Studies of the welfare of children left behind by labor migration in China have shown decidedly mixed results, which could be attributable to the fact that migration of parents can exert different impacts on different domains of children’s environments. For example, when parents migrate, children may enjoy better material conditions due to remittances and the resources that remittances can buy, but children may also suffer from loss of the “human capital” of their parents, poorer supervision and psychosocial distress. However, to our knowledge, no studies have sought to identify key mechanisms--“effect pathways”--linking parental migration to children’s outcomes.
In this paper, we propose a framework that allows for differential effects of migration on children’s long-term outcomes via effects on the home environment (adult human capital in the home and economic, social and cultural resources) and their immediate implications for children (children’s physical and psychosocial health, academic performance, and time allocation). We analyze data from the 2000 and 2015 rounds of the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF), a longitudinal study of 2000 children from 100 rural villages in China’s Northwest. Due to the small numbers of mothers who migrated at the time of the first wave of this study, in the current study, we focus on father absence. However, the framework and model proposed could be adapted to incorporate mother absence or parental absence. We apply structural equation models to estimate effect pathways: mechanisms linking father absence to long-term educational outcomes.
Results show that father absence is negatively associated with children's long-term educational attainment, but the gap between father-absent and other children can be fully accounted for by attributes of the home environment and their immediate implications for individual children. Most significantly, father absence is linked to reduced human capital at home, which has detrimental effects on children’s educational attainment. Further, father-absent children have worse physical health and more behavioral problems, both of which are associated with lower final educational attainment.
At the same time, father absence is linked to better family economic capital, which is positively associated with children’s educational attainment. In addition, father-absent households also have less farming activity, and thus children spend less time on farmwork, which benefits their educational attainment. And contrary to commonsense expectations, father absence does not decrease social capital at home. When the father is absent, the mother may pay more attention to and show more love to children, which partially buffers the negative influence of father absence.
Overall, results suggest that the loss of human capital at home resulting from father absence is the most important effect pathway linking father absence to educational attainment. Other positive influences of father absence, collectively, can only offset a small fraction (less than one-third) of this negative effect.
Finally, there are gender differences in effects and effect pathways. Greater family income in father-absent households benefits girls' educational attainment more than boys’, and the same is true for the different allocation of time to farmwork in father-absent households. In contrast, the loss of human capital effect pathway hurts boys much more than girls. Finally, consistent with a US literature suggesting the relative vulnerability of impoverished boys to family disruption, father absence results in a larger reduction of total years of education for boys than for girls (0.543 years versus 0.317 years).

Authors

• Wensong Shen, University of Pennsylvania

• Emily Hannum, University of Pennsylvania

• Li-Chung Hu, National Chengchi University