Children's Academic Performance And Parents' Well-being

As with the deepening of China's labor market reform,market has become the dominating power in labor resource allocation.For workers,education background has signaling effect and is closely related to their income and chances of upward intergenerational mobility.Under the background of education elitism and education market reform,public education funding is insufficient to afford the efficient human capital investment and shadow education prevails.The fierce education competition put forward higher requirements for parents' human capital decisions and education anxiety expands in society.This paper discusses the relationship between children's academic performance and parents' well-being with the support of three-wave data.Under the theoretical framework of well-being,this paper has three findings as follows.First,the improvement of children's academic performance would enhance the life satisfaction of parents.This effect only works well for middle-income families and single child families which means the quality –quantity tradeoff takes effect.Second,parents' involvement works as a channel for the effect.When children's education outcome is worse-off,parents may spend extra money,time and social capital to afford extra-curriculum classed and choose better schools to improve children's grades.Third,the decline of children's grades may increase the mental illness risks for parents,especially for those parents that have lower education background and lower income self-evaluation.Additionally,the negative effect may get stronger as parents getting aged.Based on the findings above,two recommendations are put forward for policy makers.On one hand,the government should carry out efficient public education involvement policies to offer more qualified education resources to lower income families and poor areas.In this way they can improve their education background and gain more chance for upward social mobility.On the other hand,the government should fasten the construction of mental health care system,whose improvement would bring great benefit for education related groups such as parents and adolescents.Periodic mental health care services can help ventilate feelings of depression and anxiety and thus enhancing the well-being of residents.