| In recent years,there has been a potential deterioration in adolescents’subjective well-being,with data from a sample of the China Education Panel Survey(CEPS)in the 2013-2014 school year showing that more than 30%of junior high school students reported "feeling depressed sometimes or often in the past week "(Li Shiyuan and Liu Aiyu,2022).The prevalence of negative emotions in the adolescent population ranges from approximately 5%-17%(Miao,R.K.,2020),implying that negative emotions can impair adolescents’ ability to experience high subjective well-being,which not only affects their own academic performance and physical and mental health,but also has a negative impact on family and social development.Therefore,it is of great practical importance to examine the negative factors affecting adolescents’ subjective well-being and the reasons behind them.Decreased levels of subjective well-being in adolescents may be associated with an increase in the number of siblings within the family.It has been found that as the number of siblings increases,it dilutes the access to individual family psychological resources and thus negatively affects adolescent mental health(Zhang,Shuang,2021).Then,the number of siblings is influenced to some extent by our fertility policy,China began to adjust its family planning policy in 2011,from the"two-child policy where both parents are only children" to the "separate two-child policy" to the "full liberalization of two-child policy" to the "three-child policy" in 2021,in just ten years,the fertility policy has changed from "encouraging only one child" to "supporting more children".From 2014 to 2017,the proportion of new births of two children has rose significantly,from 30%to about 50%;by 2019,this proportion has increased to 57%.In this paper,by combing through the relevant literature,we found that previous scholars’ studies have two views on the effect of the number of siblings on adolescents’ subjective well-being.On the one hand,the increase in the number of siblings may have a "dilution effect" on the subjective well-being of adolescents.According to Becker’s "quantity-quality" model,an increase in the number of children may lead to a decrease in the quality of children,which in turn makes it difficult to balance the material and emotional needs of children in a large family.In this case,for those adolescents who are undergoing physical and psychological changes,the subjective well-being may decrease.On the other hand,the increase in the number of siblings may also have a "role model effect" on adolescents,which may enhance their subjective well-being.Positive interactions among siblings in large families,such as helping,supporting,cooperating,and sharing happy or sad emotions,can facilitate the development of children’s emotion recognition,understanding,and regulation skills,and contribute to the formation of a harmonious family atmosphere(Feng,Y.&Wang,L.,2021).Therefore,the effect of the number of siblings on adolescents’ subjective well-being is not clear,and clarifying the effect of both effects on adolescents’ subjective well-being is crucial for individuals’physical and mental health,family harmony,and the cultivation of high-quality talents in the future society.Therefore,this paper investigates how the number of siblings affects adolescents’ well-being through theoretical and empirical studies from the perspective of family structure,taking into account the current trend of fertility policy changes.This paper first conducted OLS regressions based on data from the 2013-2014 China Education Panel Survey.The findings show that the number of siblings has a significant negative effect on adolescents’ subjective well-being.Then,to address the endogeneity problem caused by omitted variables,this paper selected two dummy variables,which were average years of education in counties and districts and the ethnic composition of parents,as instrumental variables and used 2SLS to conduct empirical evidence,and the results still showed that the number of siblings had a significant negative effect on adolescents’ subjective well-being.Then,this paper conducted heterogeneity analysis by five aspects:gender,household type,mobility status,family economic status,and whether the child was left behind.The analysis finds that for girls,rural household registration,non-mobile status,poor family status,and left-behind children,adolescents’ subjective well-being significantly decreases as the number of siblings increases;furthermore,this paper conducts robustness tests through principal component analysis,sample reduction,and database replacement,and the results show that the number of siblings still has a significant negative effect on adolescents’ subjective well-being;finally,this paper also elaborates on three influential mechanisms,namely,the "elder child effect,""adolescent self-efficacy," and "parent-child communication.Through group regression of children’s ranking,this paper finds that the number of siblings has a significant negative effect on the well-being of the eldest child and the youngest child,and by comparing parents’ treatment of the eldest child and the youngest child in four aspects:academic achievement requirements,educational expectations,whether to participate in out-of-school tutoring or interest classes,and time spent with them,we find that this negative effect is no longer caused by the idea of preference for sons over daughters,but is more likely to be due to parents’preference for having both children.By examining the two channels of "adolescent self-efficacy" and "parent-child communication",we also find that higher adolescent self-efficacy and good parent-child communication could positively moderate the negative effect of the number of siblings on adolescents’ subjective well-being.The novelty of this paper is that,firstly,we study the effect of sibling number on individual subjective well-being from the perspective of adolescents,while most previous studies have focused on intergenerational well-being such as the number or quality of children,child gender on parental well-being,and elderly well-being;secondly,this paper uses instrumental variables to address the endogeneity problem caused by omitted variables and demonstrates that the relationship between sibling number and adolescents’ subjective well-being There is a causal relationship.In contrast,existing topics examining the effect of sibling number on adolescents’subjective well-being often fail to discuss and address the endogeneity issue,and thus reveal a correlation rather than a causal relationship.Shortcomings of this paper:First,this paper uses the China Education Tracking Survey(CEPS)survey data from the 2013-2014 school year,which is cross-sectional,so it can only observe the static subjective well-being of individual adolescents,but not their dynamic changes in well-being throughout adolescence.Second,due to the limitations of the variables in the database,the information of multiple births with the sex combination of the first two births and matching the sex ratio of each province and city cannot be realized,so this paper has limitations in selecting the instrumental variables,and finally chooses the average years of education in the county and district and the ethnicity of parents as the instrumental variables of the number of siblings.Based on the results,this paper proposes to actively respond to and solve the real problem of low subjective well-being of adolescents in families with many children from five aspects:strengthening the tolerance of employees in enterprises and institutions for families with many children,helping adolescents to build up self-confidence,strengthening the scientific popularization of family psychology knowledge,promoting the work of adolescent mental health education through multiple channels,and deepening the reform of urban-rural dual household registration system and vigorously developing the rural revitalization strategy. |
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