A Study On The Influence Of Parental Out-of-order On The Academic Performance Of Left-behind Children

Since the mid-eighties,a large number of workers left their hometown and migrated to the city.Their children are often left at the countryside and raised by other relatives,being Left Behind Children(or LBCs).China has more than 60 million LBCs in 2010.If parental migration harms the education or human capital formation of LBCs,it could directly increase education inequality in the short run and indirectly increase income inequality in the long run,and it’s harmful to China’s economic growth.The impact of parental migration on the academic performance of LBCs has drawn attention from many policymakers and researchers.Existing studies have not consistently estimated the impact of parental migration on the academic performance of LBCs.Studies have shown that parental migration influences LBCs’ academic performance through two ways.On the one hand,some studies suggest that remittance income could improve academic performance by increasing investment in children and their education,which is the positive income effect.On the other hand,other studies claim that parental absence could harm academic performance by decreasing parental care and increasing the domestic responsibilities of the children left behind,which is the negative parental care effect.The net impact of parental migration on LBCs’ academic performance depends on the combination of income effect and parental care effect.The net impact of parental migration on LBCs,academic performance differs in different migration orders.When a parent(usually is the father)migrated during the first period of time,which is the first-parent migration.And when the remaining parent(usually is the mother)leaves the home and migrated,which is the second-parent migration.Given that the diminishing marginal returns to remittance income and departure of the final parental caregiver(mother usually),the positive income effect is weaker and the negative parental care effect is stronger for second-parent migration than for first-parent migration.Thus,the impact of first-parent migration should be more positive for first-parent migration than for second-parent migration.This paper estimates different impacts of both first-parent and second-parent migration on LBCs’ academic performance,and test the hypothesis that the positive income effect and negative parental care effect are different for first-parent migration and second-parent migration.This paper draws on a panel dataset of more than 5,000 students from 72 rural primary schools in Shaanxi Province collected by Rural Education Action Program(REAP)in 2011and 2012.Using a Difference-in-Difference(DID)approach,we compare LBCs’ school achievement across households of first-parent migration and second-parent migration.Besides,the paper also draws on a panel dataset of more than 13,000 rural students in Qinghai Province collected by REAP in 2013 and 2014,using the same approach as the verification of the analysis results of Shaanxi sample.We find that second-parent migration has statistically significant negative impacts on student performance.Importantly,second-parent parental migration is shown to have a more negative impact on academic performance than first-parent migration.Specifically,scores of standardized math test of students in second-parent migrant households decreased 0.04 SD(standard deviations).This fall in test scores for the children of second-parent migrant households is 0.02 SD more than students in first-parent migrant households and the difference is significant in statistics.Such a result is consistent with the hypothesis that the negative effect of losing the last of a family’s parental care(as the second parent out-migrates)is greater than the positive effect of extra income that the parent generates.Heterogeneous analysis indicates that the negative impact is most pronounced for those who are most susceptible to a decrease in parental care,namely a family’s oldest child(who would be expected to take on more parental duties when both parents had out-migrated)and students who live at home(as opposed to living in school as a boarder who can be cared by teachers to reduce the negative parental care effect).In addition,heterogeneous analysis of Qinghai sample also indicates second-parent migration has a more positive effect on minority students,suggesting positive income effect offsets negative parental care effect greater for poorer minority students.In light of our findings,we believe policy makers should take action to help improve the situation of LBCs.One possibility is improving the quality of boarding schools so that it could decrease the negative impact of parental migration on LBCs through living in schools.The other effective and low-cost solution is reforming of hukou policy,so that migrant children would have urban hukou and be able to attend public schools.Actually,the huge human capital gap exists in all rural children,not only in Left Behind Children.Therefore,all rural children need the investment and help of national policy.