Divorce,Teachers' Characteristics And Non-cognitive Skills Of Middle School Students

With the increase in divorce rate recently,people are concerned about the children in divorced families.While the literature often emphasizes the negative effects of divorce on children,this paper discusses the circumstances under which the negative effects of divorce can be remedied.Based on the data from the China Education Panel Survey in the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 academic years,this paper studies the heterogeneity of the effects of parental divorce on children's non-cognitive abilities by using the quasi-natural experiment of random assignment.The main conclusions of the study are as follows:(1)divorce increases the mental stress of children by 0.171 standard deviations and decreases the pleasantness of children by 0.106 standard deviations;(2)teachers with divorce experience can reduce the mental stress of students in divorced families by 0.260 standard deviations and improve their pleasantness by 0.213 standard deviations.The main reason behind this is that such teachers can build a more friendly environment for students in divorced families.Furthermore,this paper finds that there are gender differences,ethnic differences and urban-rural differences in this effect.To sum up,this paper puts forward the following policy implements: on the one hand,solving family conflicts rather than avoiding divorce is a better way to ensure the healthy growth of children;On the other hand,facing the rising divorce rate,teachers should build a good growing environment for students in divorced families so that they can get out of the adverse impact imposed by their parents' divorce earlier.