Research On The Mechanism Of The Influence Of Family Income On Early Childhood Development

Since reform and opening up policy launched,China has stepped into the rank of middle-income countries.But since 2012 the growth rate of economy slowed down to less than 7.7%,which means that China stepped into "new normal" economy with middle-high growth speed.Owing to the contribution of the population bonus,China's economy made a rapid growth.However,with the aged tendency of population and the decrease of child-bearing willingness,the population bonus has gradually gone.The theory of economy growth indicates that the human capital is the important source of economic growth.So we should put human capital investment on an important place in the future to make the economy keep on growing.0 to 3 years old is the critical period of children's growing,children's development at this stage determines the upper limit of their lifetime capacity.However,due to the unbalanced economic development in China,the development of rural children lag far behind the urban children.Family income is an important factor to early childhood development,but it doesn't directly affect early childhood development.Foreign researchers put forward"family investment model" and“family stress model”to explain the mediating mechanism of income on children's development.However,domestic research on this topic is very few,and mostly concentrated on urban children,there is little research about rural children.So this paper analyzes the influence of family income on the early childhood development in rural areas and explore the influence mechanism.Importantly,this paper provides theoretical support and empirical evidence for improving children's early development in poor rural areas from the perspective of practical intervention.The data this paper analyzed is from the baseline of parenting project,collected by the research team in November 2015 and April 2016 in rural areas of Qinba mountain.We use the STATA14.2 software to analyze the data,and we obtained 1855 valid samples at last.First,the paper did descriptive analysis at first.Then,we analyzed the simple mediating effect and multiple mediating effect between family income and early childhood development.Finally,the paper analyzed family assets,as a robustness test to family income.The research results show that;(1)The early development of children in sample areas is delayed severely,more than half of the children in the sample delayed in cognitive and language development,46%delayed in social emotional development,and 36%are motor delayed.(2)There are significant differences in the early development of children with different levels of family income.The early development of rural children become better and better with the increase of family income.(3)The simple mediating effect analysis indicates that the family environment played significant positive mediating effect.The birth weight of children has a weak positive mediating effect on motor development,and the number of guardians expressing intimate feelings over the past two days has a significant positive mediating effect on social-emotional development.(4)In the multiple mediating effect analysis,the total indirect effects of mediating variables are highly significant at the level of 1%,and the varieties of toys play the most important mediating effect.(5)Mediating effect analysis between family assets and early childhood development has similar results of family income.This means the results of family income is valid.In a word,besides the parent-children interaction significantly influences the childhood development,the varieties of toys have the biggest mediating effect in both simple and multiple mediating analysis.Therefore,the family income is mainly through changing the parent-child interaction and the varieties of toys to put an influence on the early childhood development.Based on results of this paper,we propose the following policy recommendations:(1)Because of the important role of family income on early childhood development,government should provide subsidy to poor family of children.(2)The government could also promote the early development of the rural children by implementing the intervention,such as do some training about how to rearing the child in rural areas,or build parenting centers or picture book libraries in rural areas and provide the guidance of rearing the child scientifically at the same time.