Resource Allocation Of Education Among Urban Families

The implementation of the family planning policy in the last forty years has significantly lowered China's fertility rate,and the reduction in the number of children in families has been shown to weaken the degree of gender inequality in education consequently.Because boy preference is still rooted in Chinese society nowadays,girls from non-only children still have some disadvantages in education attainment.This shows that the only-child status and gender in the present still may exert influence on the individuals' access to educational resources.With the limitations of the data,the subjects of the relevant studies are the people who have graduated from school,so they pay more attention to the analysis of the inequality of educational outcomes and lack the discussion about the inequality in the education process.The drawback of this is that we cannot directly respond to the hypothesis of resource dilution,how educational resources will be affected by sibling structure will not be discussed especially in the specific social and cultural context.Family investment in education resources is an important part of social reproduction.Therefore,it is necessary to understand the inequality of education by analyzing the allocation of family education resources.This study will use a dataset from a national survey conducted in twelve Chinese cities to explore how the only-child status and gender of school-age students exert influence on the access to educational resources,which will help us understand education inequality in the process of education.The amount of education resources that school-age children can receive depends on their family background,but the previous studies treated the family as a single decision maker,which cannot show different impacts of father and mother in the allocation of education resources.Because of the only-child adult will show stronger awareness of gender equality,so the influence of parents' only-child status can not be ignored in the analysis of education resource allocation.It is likely for only child to allocate education resource more equally in term of gender after they become parents.This article attempts to answer the following questions:1.Do the only-child status and gender of the children affect the allocation of family education resources.2,Do the only-child status of parents affect the allocation of family resources?By answering the first part of the question,this study attempts to explore whether the gender continues to affect individual educational resources after nearly forty years of implementation of the one-child policy.With the aim of understanding the only child's life course,the exploration of the second part intends to find out whether parents'only-child status can exert influence on educational investment.The two-part issues focus two generations of only child,and we try to discuss the impact of the major events in the life course of the only child on their children's education.By analyzing children's private supplementary tutoring in urban families,this study found that whether children are the only child,the gender of children can exert influence on the allocation of educational resources among current Chinese urban families:non-only child have less access to educational resources than the only child;girls of non-only children have no advantage in access to educational resources in private supplementary tutoring,the existence of brothers and sisters has negative effect on the girl's access to educational resources;among non-only children,the eldest son doesn't have more access to educational resources than the eldest girl,but the smaller the age space is,the more access to educational resources the girls can have.In addition,whether the parent is the only child also has an impact on the allocation of educational resources:whether the mother is the only child has a significant impact on the children's educational resources,especially in the case of two children,if mother is a non-only child,there is a negative impact on the child's access to educational resources;after the control of the mother's education and monthly income,the significance of mother's only-child status disappeared,then the mother's education and monthly income have positive effects for non-only child's educational resources.This shows that the difference in educating children between the only child and non-only child is likely to be brought by education.Above all,this study argues that the amount of educational resources that non-only children and girls can receive will be reduced under the Two-children policy in the future,which will increase the number of children in the family.Finally,this study tries to put forward policy suggestions:1,government should come up with policies and regulations to regulate the market of private supplementary tutoring in order to prohibit family from making the education resource allocation strategy which can generate gender differences,especially for the family with heavy burden in investing children's education;2,the mother was found to have significant effects on non-only child's education resources,so implementing relevant family policy to improve the well-being of women is particularly important under the Two-children policy.