The Impact Of Grandchild Care On Household Consumption

In the context of population aging,urbanization accelerating and the national two-child policy,the family practice of grandparents helping their children to care for grandchildren has become common.In this paper,the correlation between grandchild care and family consumption was empirically tested using Chinese Family Panel Survey data(CFPS).The main conclusions of this paper are as follows :(1)At the significance level of 10%,grandchild care had a negative impact on total household consumption,which was 3.19% lower,and at the significance level of 1%,which was 10.49% lower.(2)regression analysis was conducted on three different types of grandchild care families,and the results showed that grandchild care behaviors had a negative impact on total consumption and food consumption in the left-behind families and the flowing families,but had no significant impact on consumption in the three generations of families.In the process of grandchild care affecting consumption,household net income and household household registration have significant regulating effects.With the increase of family net income,the negative effect of intergenerational care on family consumption was reduced.The negative effect of grandchild care on urban household consumption was less,but the negative effect on non-urban household consumption was greater.(4)quantile regression results showed that forfamilies with medium consumption level,grandchild care significantly reduced the total household consumption by 3.22% and food consumption by 3.86%.For households with low and high consumption levels,grandchild care had no significant effect on household consumption.(5)based on the theory of rational reciprocity and the theory of altruism,this paper conducts the mediation test.The results show that the net economic transfer from grandparents to parents plays a mediating effect in the process of the influence of grandchild care on consumption,and the mediating effect accounts for 22.93% of the total effect.This paper explains the effect of grandchild care on household consumption in two aspects-direct path and indirect path.The direct effect can be explained as follows: first,the substitution of grandparents' time cost for money cost;Second,the substitution of grandchild care for public child care services will reduce the cost of child care for families and thus reduce total household consumption.To some extent,the mediating effect of the net economic transfer from grandparents to grandchildren can be explained by the voluntary money subsidy that is neglected in the process of caring for grandchildren.Grandparents who have a net financial shift to their children tend to be better off themselves,and they may have a voluntary financial subsidy to care for their grandchildren.At the same time,this part of the voluntary financial subsidy may be missed by the financial question interviewee when calculating the amount of householdconsumption.Based on the conclusion of empirical analysis,this paper gives policy Suggestions: first,the government should pay attention to the negative impact of grandchild care on family consumption,and make rational use of the regulating effects of family income and household registration.Second,the government should attach importance to the supply of child care services,accelerate the construction of basic public services for child care,and strongly support the development of market-oriented service institutions for child care.