The Educational Disparity between Chinese Singletons and Non-Singletons Due to Parental Educational Investments

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Global Educational Stratification and "Shadow" Schooling

Abstract

According to the resource dilution model, as parental resources are limited, the number of siblings is negatively related to the amount of resources allocated to each child. This disparity in resource distribution is considered one of the contributing factors to the differences in academic achievement between only child and children with siblings. However, as parental resources can take various forms, previous studies have not reached a consensus on which specific types of resources drive these achievement gaps. Additionally, parental resource allocation strategies may differ significantly between families with two children and those with three or more children. Therefore, this study investigates the specific type of parental educational investments that contribute to the academic performance differences among the only child, children from two-child families, and children from families with three or more children. Using data from China Education Panel Survey, the results from a series of OB decompositions show that, when comparing children from these three types of families pairwise, different parental investment factors contribute to the observed gaps. However, higher parental educational aspirations contribute to the performance gap across all comparisons. These results provide new insights to understand how intergenerational resource transmission contribute to the intragenerational educational inequality under different fertility decisions across families.

Author

• Xiao Yuan