Research On The Impact Of Intergenerational Care On Children's Health

With the opening up of the birth policy,more and more babies will be born in China,and Chinese families will face more child care problems.The way of child care is crucial to children's nutrition and health.Children's health is positively correlated with their adult health,life expectancy,educational attainment,future labor supply and income,and is an important indicator of a country's economic development.Grandparents caring has become the main trend of Chinese family child care at present.It is of great practical and theoretical significance to explore whether grandparents caring has a positive or negative impact on children's health.Through the research and analysis of the theory of child health production,the theory of determinants of child health and related literature,this study puts forward four hypotheses about the influence of grandparents caring on children's health.In the empirical part of the paper,this paper used the data of CFPS in 2016 and selected four indexes including height-for-age Z Score(HAZ),weight-for-age Z Score(WAZ),BMI-for-age Z Score(BAZ)and self-rated health index to investigate the impact of grandparents caring on children's health from objective and subjective perspectives.In the control of other various confounding factors may affect children's health condition,this paper selects the multiple regression analysis to analyze the objective health indicators,and the ordered Probit model regression analysis was carried out on the subjective health indicators.IV estimation was made for the model,and the number of retired grandparents of children was taken as the instrumental variable to overcome the possible endogenous problems in the study,so as to obtain more credible conclusions and explore the real effect of intergenerational care on children's health.Furthermore,further robustness tests were conducted by the propensity score matching method(PSM)and the adjustment of the independent variable to grandparents caring intensity to enhance the credibility of the research conclusions.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:first,grandparents caring has a positive effect on children's objective health status,but parents/children believe that grandparents caring has a negative effect on children's health.This could be due to the narrowing gap in nutritional knowledge between grandparents and parents,changes in family structure and social competitive pressures.Parents can't provide enough company when they take care of children for work reasons,and the income effect brought by grandparents caring has a greater impact on modern families.Therefore,grandparents caring is better for children's health.But there are a lot of misunderstanding,with grandparents' nutritional knowledge and inadequate care practices having a greater negative impact on children.Second,the health score of urban children is slightly higher than that of rural children,but the positive effect of grandparents caring on rural children is more obvious.Most children in rural areas are forced to be separated from their parents.Grandparents caring can provide better growing environment for children than other methods,while it is rare for urban children,so grandparents caring is more helpful for rural children.When the main labor force in a family is faced with intense social survival and competitive pressure,the grandparents' care for children can not only help solve the pressure of their parents' care for children,but also increase the overall welfare of the family and improve the overall economic benefit for the society.Through the argumentation of this study,it is shown that grandparents caring is beneficial to children's health at the same time,and the government should encourage and support family grandparents caring.On the one hand,the government should strengthen the construction of community social capital,improve residents' knowledge level of nutrition and health through publicity,training and other means,to compensate the negative impact of this deficiency on children's health,and eliminate misunderstanding of grandparents caring.On the other hand,we need to improve social security and housing security for residents,and to provide more security for grandparents who now move to the cities where parents work to care for the children,so as to clear the way for families'grandparents caring strategy.