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Differential Effects of Parents’ Education on Adolescent Well-being Outcomes

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Abstract

This paper compares the causal effect of parents’ education on three outcomes of their adolescent offspring aged 10–15 years in China. Empirical results from propensity score matching show that only mothers with a college degree have an effect on the emotional well-being of adolescents. Mothers’ educational influence on health and emotional well-being of adolescents is also greater than fathers but in rural areas, only father’s education has an impact on health and education of the adolescents. Sons however benefit more than daughters in the domains of health and educational well-being from parents’ education. Evidence indicates that promoting women’s education is a key urban policy although in rural areas, empowering women and providing an enabling environment through communities and schools is critical to improving various well-being outcomes of the next generation.

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Data Availability

The data used in this article are available online. Institute of Social Science Survey, Peking University, 2015, "China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)". https://doi.org/10.18170/DVN/45LCSO

Code Availability

Stata 15 is used for the estimation in this paper. Code is available upon request.

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Notes

  1. We also used factor analysis of the items for these scores and results were found to be qualitatively similar.

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  1. School of Economics, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Renuka Mahadevan

  2. Center for Innovation and Development Studies, Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus, Guangdong, 519000, China

    Sha Fan

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 8 Probit estimation results in PSM for mother’s education
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Appendix 2

Table 9 Covariate balance in the average treatment effect for mother’s education
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Appendix 3

Table 10 Rosenbuam bounds sensitivity analysis of treatment effects
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Mahadevan, R., Fan, S. Differential Effects of Parents’ Education on Adolescent Well-being Outcomes. Child Ind Res 14, 2495–2516 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-021-09856-7

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