Shen, Wensong
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Publication Short- and Long-Term Outcomes of the Left Behind in China: Education, Well-Being and Life Opportunities(2018-01-01) Hannum, Emily; Hu, Li-Chung; Shen, WensongThis report addresses the scope of China’s left-behind phenomenon and its roots in migration and education policies. It reviews evidence about disadvantages associated with left-behind status and discusses recent policy responses to the left-behind phenomenon. Empirical evidence is drawn from a national study of middle school students and a 15-year longitudinal case-study of children from rural Gansu, China. While a number of prior studies have shown mixed findings about the scale of educational disadvantage of left-behind children, compared to other groups, evidence presented here indicates that even after adjusting for school or community and household socioeconomic status, there are multiple domains in which homes of left-behind children are disadvantaged. They tend to live in households characterized by poorer health resources, cultural resources and social resources. By definition, they lose access, at least temporarily, to the “human capital” of their absent parents. Children in the short term thus experience more physiological, psychological, and (in the national comparison) educational disadvantages than their non-left-behind counterparts. In the long-term, our case study from Gansu Province suggests that father absence is associated with reduced educational attainment and possibly greater propensity to migrate, but not employment or long-term family relations. Overall, disadvantages appear to be more consistent and more generalized for mother-absent and dual-parent-absent families than for father-absent families. We discuss policy responses, and possible policy strategies, in the closing segment of the report. Policy reforms that obviate the need for children to be left behind are one evident solution to the problem, and some steps appear to be happening in this direction, but local resistance may be substantial. More immediately, boarding schools and community centers are commonly-proposed policy solutions to address the immediate needs of left-behind children, with promise but some clear pitfalls. Other possible supports are discussed.Publication A Tangled Web: The Reciprocal Relationship between Depression and Educational Outcomes in China(2019-09-05) Shen, WensongResearch on depression and education usually focuses on a unidirectional relationship. This paper proposes a reciprocal relationship, simultaneously estimating the effects of depression on education and of education on depression. China, which has the world’s largest education system, is used as a case study. This paper applies structural equation modeling to three datasets: the China Family Panel Studies, the China Education Panel Survey, and the Gansu Survey of Children and Families. Analyses reveal a reciprocal and negative relationship between depression and educational outcomes. Specifically, early depression reduces later educational achievement, and higher educational achievement also lowers the level of subsequent depression by resulting in less peers’ unfriendliness, less pressure from parents’ expectations, and less teachers’ criticism. More time spent on studies is not associated with higher educational achievement but significantly increases the level of depression. Children from lower SES families bear more pressure and spend more time on studies, which does not correspond to higher educational achievement but rather to higher levels of depression. In the long term, prior depression lowers educational attainment and, after controlling for prior depression, lower educational attainment is also associated with higher levels of subsequent depression. This paper shows that the lower achievers, not the high achievers, bear the major psychological burden of the education system’s quest to produce high achievement. This situation reinforces these students’ educational disadvantage.Publication Effect Pathways of Informal Family Separation on Children’s Outcomes: Paternal Labor Migration and Long-term Educational Attainment of Left-Behind Children in Rural China(2021-02-01) Shen, Wensong; Hu, Li-ChungInformal family separation due to parental labor migration is an increasingly common experience in the lives of children in many countries. This paper proposes a framework and method for analyzing “effect pathways” by which parental labor migration might affect children’s outcomes. The framework incorporates home-environment and child-development mechanisms and is adapted from migration, sociology of education and child development literatures. We test these pathways using data on father absence and long-term educational outcomes for girls and boys in China. We apply structural equation models with inverse probability of treatment weighting to data from a 15-year longitudinal survey of 2,000 children. Significantly, fathers’ migration has distinct implications for different effect pathways. It is associated most significantly with reduced human capital at home, which has the largest detrimental effect on children’s educational attainment, among those studied. At the same time, father absence is associated with better family economic capital, which partially buffers the negative implications of father absence. Overall, father absence corresponds to a reduction of 0.342 years on average in children’s educational attainment, but the reduction is larger for boys than for girls. For boys and girls, the reduced availability of literate adults in the household linked to father absence is an important effect pathway. For girls, this detrimental effect is partially offset by a positive income effect, but for boys, the offset effect is trivial.