| For more than 40 years since China's reform and opening up,China has always adhered to economic development as the center,continuously liberated and developed social productive forces,and achieved sustained and stable economic growth.In recent years,China has made great achievements in improving people's livelihood and eradicating poverty.However,to successfully rank among high-income countries and achieve the "two centenary goals",China still faces a series of problems such as weakening advantages of demographic dividend and the pressure of economic downturn.International experience shows that an important basis for achieving the transition from middle-income countries to high-income countries is to comprehensively improve the quality of the population in order to break through the constraints of human capital on industrial transformation and economic development.Considering the particularity of China's large rural population,it is of great significance to improve the quality of rural labor force in the overall improvement of population quality.In addition,from the perspective of investment efficiency in various stages of human capital,human capital investment in individuals from the beginning of life helps to solve the fundamental problems of human capital development,and the cost-benefit of investing in preventive interventions such as early childhood development is much higher than that of compensating interventions such as school education and adult education.Many international studies have confirmed that high quality early intervention can effectively promote the early development of infants.At present,the early intervention program is carried out in China through home visits with limited coverage,and there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of other intervention modes using scientific research methods.Based on panel data of 1,625 infants and their families in the Qinba Mountains,this study uses econometric and experimental economics methods to describe the status of early development of infants and children aged 0-3 in rural areas and their parenting knowledge,attitudes,and behaviors.On the basis of the current situation,we analyze the effect of parenting intervention projects(establish a village-level early childhood development center with free books,toys,etc.,and provide free parent-child activity guidance for rural families in the center)on infants' cognition,language,and motion and social emotional development in rural China.This study also analyzes the mechanism behind the effects of interventions.From the early stage of infants and young children as the starting point,to provide reference recommendations for the overall improvement of the quality of China's population,and to provide relevant scientific basis for China's relevant departments on early childhood development planning and implementation of service projects.In order to achieve the above goals,the contents of this article include:(1)Describing the status of early childhood development and parenting attitude,parenting knowledge and parenting behavior in rural areas.Firstly,this research will describe the early childhood development level from the four aspects of infants' cognition,language,motion,and social emotions,and describe the current status of parenting from three aspects of parenting knowledge,attitude and behavior.(2)Evaluation of parenting intervention projects(establishing a village-level early childhood development activity center and providing free parent-child activity guidance,picture books,toys,etc.for rural families in the center)on infants' cognitive,language,motion,and social emotional development.Also,we analyze the heterogeneous effects of the intervention.(3)Analyze the impact mechanism of parenting interventions on the level of early childhood development.The main conclusions of this study are summarized as follows:(1)Infants and young children in rural China have risks of lagging development in cognition,language,motion,and social emotions.The parenting attitudes,knowledge,and behaviors of rural caregivers need to be improved.(2)Parenting intervention project(establishing a village-level early childhood development center with free picture books,toys,etc.and providing free parent-child activity guidance for rural families within the center)can significantly improve infants' cognition,language,and motion in rural areas,and the average intention intervention effect is better than the average intervention effect,but the two-year intervention study did not find that the parenting intervention program significantly improved the social emotional development of infants.In terms of heterogeneity analysis of the intervention effect,the intervention played a better role in promoting the development of boys' motion than girls,and the intervention played a better role in promoting the social emotional development of infants in non-subsistence allowance families than that in the subsistence allowance family.(3)The effects of parenting intervention programs in promoting early development of infants and young children are mainly achieved by improving the parenting behavior of caregivers and the direct impact of the intervention itself,and no "crowding effect" was found in the parenting behaviors.That is,people will not reduce their time investment and investment behaviors to their children because of intervention.Based on the conclusions of this study and previous studies on early childhood development,we propose several suggestions for early human capital investment:(1)Implement policies and measures for early childhood development as soon as possible,determine early childhood development service plans,and provide scientific methods for local service of early childhood development.(2)In rural areas with high population densities,considering to promoting parenting intervention projects according to local conditions,that is,model combining parenting center with free picture books and toys and providing free parent-child activity guidance and home-visitation program. |
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