| As China’s economic development enters the new normal,the strategy of strengthening the country with talents has been continuously implemented,and the demand for talents in the whole society has become increasingly urgent,and education has played an increasingly important role in this process.For a long time,the Chinese government has been strengthening the guarantee,increasing the investment in education,strengthening the construction of teachers,improving school facilities,etc.to help talents achieve better development,and these measures have ensured the relative fairness of education to a certain extent.With the continuous development of China’s education management system and the continuous improvement of management ability,family education has increasingly become the focus of people’s attention,and the requirements of our society for family education are getting higher and higher.In family education,the education of mothers is an indispensable part,but in the issue of balancing career and family,different mothers will make different choices,and the role of mothers will be different,some mothers will leave the labor market and return home as "full-time mothers",however,there will also be a part of the labor market to become "working mothers",and these women become the focus of this article.According to the theory of educational production function,different family background and family decisions will have different effects on individual cognitive skills.Family education expenditure will have an impact on cognitive skills through school level education,and family companionship will give children some care and care,which is conducive to children’s mental health development,so it will inevitably affect children’s cognitive skills.Mother labor participation affects children’s cognitive skills through income effect and substitution effect,so the comprehensive impact direction is uncertain and needs empirical analysis.Therefore,the focus of this study is to explore the impact of maternal labor participation on children’s cognitive skills,to analyze the impact path,and to analyze whether there is consistency in the impact of different samples.This paper selects students in the compulsory education stage from the 2018 China Family Tracking Survey(CFPS)database as the research object.The analysis process follows the following steps: Firstly,using literature research and theoretical research to study the educational production function model,and using the instrumental variable method to carry out empirical research to estimate the effect of mother labor participation on children’s cognitive skills;Secondly,the robustness of regression results is tested.Thirdly,on the basis of preliminary estimation,income effect and substitution effect are separated for mechanism analysis.Finally,sub-sample regression was carried out to discuss the heterogeneity of children in gender,household registration,education stage and family income.The empirical results show that the mother’s labor participation has a significant effect on the cognitive skills of children in the full sample.The mechanism analysis shows that the increase of mother’s labor participation will significantly increase the probability and duration of children’s participation in remedial classes,but it will also significantly reduce the probability of mother’s day and night care for children.From the sub-sample results: First,the mother labor participation on the cognitive skills of girls more than boys;Second,the improvement of the cognitive skills of the children with agricultural household registration is greater than that of non-agricultural household registration.Thirdly,the improvement of the cognitive skills of the junior middle school students is greater than that of the primary school students.Fourth,maternal labor participation improves the cognitive skills of children from middle and low-income families more than children from middle and high-income families.Based on the above empirical results,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations: 1.Promote female labor participation and implement flexible employment system;2.To broaden the channels for women’s rural employment and improve the rural employment security system;3.Creating a good environment for family education and making reasonable investment in family education;4.Actively promote home-school education cooperation and optimize educational outcomes. |
