Choice Of Care Style For Preschool Children And Women's Labor Participation In Urban China

As an important source of labor supply,women's labor participation plays an important role in gender equality and falily income.However,in recent years,the female labor participation rate in China has shown a marked downward trend,and the female labor supply in China shows that the advantage of labor resources is weakening year by year.With the deepening of aging,the contradiction of population structure has become increasingly prominent,and the problem of insufficient labor supply has deepened.At the same time,the comprehensive two-child policy to alleviate the aging problem has not achieved the desired results.Based on this,in order to explore the feasibility of further releasing the labor supply under the existing population,a comprehensive and systematic study was carried out on the labor supply of urban women from the perspective of preschool child care.In modem society,in order to achieve the balance between work and family,Especially between work and childcare,women need external support to achieve,such as support within the family,market purchase support and so on.Since ancient times,our country has a tradition of grandparents caring for grandchildren.The tradition of alternate generation caring can not only promote mutual help among family members,maintain emotions,But also reduce the pressure of childbearing of married women,and provide support for avoiding career interruption.However,in recent years,there has been a trend of delayed retirement in Chinese cities,which is bound to have an impact on women,s labor participation,Especially those who choose alternative care.The backward and weak development of kindergartens for children under 3 years old in China will also be detrimental to children's equal education and women's employment.This may be one of the reasons why the comprehensive two-child policy has not achieved its expectations,and it also puts forward higher requirements for child care.Therefore,How to achieve the balance between child care and employment has become a difficult problem for many women.This article combs and analyses the literatures about formal education and intergenerational care at home and abroad on women's employment and labor participation,and obtains the general relationship between the way of child care and women's employment.Based on the theories of labor supply and family economics,and referring to the relevant research results at home and abroad,the data of China Nutrition and Health Survey(CHNS)in 2000,2004,2006,2009,2011 and 2015 were selected,and the estimation method of Probit model was used to take formal education and intergenerational care as the core at the same time.The explanatory variables are used to analyze the labor participation of urban women,and the endogenous factors are solved by the instrumental variable method.Through empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:the choice of alternative care and formal education can significantly improve women's labor participation,increasing by 6.0%and 8.1%,respectively.After two-stage least squares estimation(2SLS)was used to control endogenesis by selecting "the number of brothers and sisters of women and their spouses" as the instrumental variable of intergenerational care,the use of intergenerational care could significantly increase women's labor participation by 42.5%compared with non-intergenerational care,and the use of intergenerational care could greatly increase women's labor participation rate.In terms of promotion,Formal education has no siguificant effect on women's labor participation,But it is still positive.From the age point of view,there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the age of urban women and their labor participation.From the perspective of educational factors,women with low educational level tend to withdraw from the labor market,and high educational level has a significant positive effect on urban married women's labor participation.When children are between 0 and 2 years old,they have a significant inhibitory effect on women's labor participation.The substitution effect of spouse's income on urban women,s labor participation in decision-making is stronger than that of income.Facing the increase of spouse's income,urban women still tend to participate in work,When living in suburban areas,women tend to work more.However,Because of endogenous reasons,the symbols of spouse's income and residence have changed after using instrumental variable method,But they are not significant.Considering the trend of delayed retirement in Chinese cities and ensuring the smooth progress of the comprehensive two-child policy,in order to increase the participation rate of women in labor,the government should attach importance to and support elderly caregivers,Consider implementing flexible retirement system,and improve the employment security system and childcare policy for women to ensure that all age groups are protected,Especially the full coverage and high quality of formal education for preschool children aged 0-2 years.