Does parental absence reduce cognitive achievements? Evidence from rural China

TLDR

Many children worldwide are left‑behind by parents migrating for work—over 61 million in rural China alone, almost half of whom are left‑behind by both parents. While previous literature considers impacts of one parent absent on educational inputs, this study directly investigates impacts on children’s learning (test scores) and distinguishes the effects of absence of one versus both parents. Dynamic panel methods that control for unobserved individual heterogeneity and endogeneity in parental absence are applied to data collected from rural China. The estimates show that being left‑behind by both parents significantly reduces children’s cognitive achievement by 5.4 percentile points in math and 5.1 in Chinese, whereas being left‑behind by one parent has only small, insignificant effects, and cross‑sectional evidence further indicates that only dual‑parent absence is associated with markedly lower family inputs in after‑school tutoring.

Abstract

Many children worldwide are left-behind by parents migrating for work — over 61 million in rural China alone, almost half of whom are left-behind by both parents. While previous literature considers impacts of one parent absent on educational inputs (e.g., study time, enrollment, schooling attainment), this study directly investigates impacts on children's learning (test scores) and distinguishes impacts of absence of one versus both parents. Dynamic panel methods that control for both unobserved individual heterogeneity and endogeneity in parental absence are used with data collected from rural China. The estimates indicate significant negative impacts of being left-behind by both parents on children's cognitive development, reducing their contemporary achievements by 5.4 percentile points for math and 5.1 percentile points for Chinese, but much smaller insignificant impacts of being left-behind by one parent. Cross-sectional evidence indicates that only absence of both parents is associated with substantially lower family inputs in after-school tutoring.