| Children’s health is not only an important indicator of economic development,but also related to their health and income throughout their lives.Currently,due to the imbalance of social development,there is a large gap between urban and rural areas in the healthy development of children,especially in poor areas.According the national census in 2010,there are about 86.5 percent of 360 million children live in rural areas and almost half of the children under 3 years old live in poor rural areas.Furthermore,women are the main bearers of childcare and play an important role in the process of children’s growth.Therefore,studying the influencing factors on children’s health is particularly important for formulating policies on human capital’s development.This paper mainly studies the influence of mother’s education on children’s health in rural China and explores the channel of the intergenerational effect from characteristics of children and family.The research based on previous research experience,assess the effect of maternal education on children’s heath in rural China with the data from China Nutrition and Health Survey.The main research work of this paper is as follows: First,this article measures the child’s health level according to the “standard deviation score” proposed by the World Health Organization,and an instrumental variable approach is applied to control for the potential endogeneity of maternal education.The result of two-stage least squares show that the mother’s education level increased by one unit,the child’s age-specific height Z score,the body weight Z score and the body mass index Z score were increased by 0.16,0.196,and 0.122,respectively.Second,the research also test the channel of the effect of maternal education through the family wealth,assortative mating,and the performance of children in health.In this paper,Polychoric Principal Component Analysis is used to synthesize the indicators of family assets.The empirical results show that the higher of the mother’s educational level means the family with higher index of family wealth and the per capita annual income,and spouse with higher education.In addition,the study in this paper also find that the higher of the mother’s educational level means the children with greater probability to have medical insurance and health care services,as well as participate sports activities.Furthermore,in terms of nutritional diets,the results of the study show that improving mothers’ education can improve children’s nutritional and dietary knowledge,as well as children’s protein and fat intake,and make children’s protein intake close to optimal intake levels.On the basis of the conclusions of the research,this paper suggests that emphasize the healthy development of children in rural areas and improve the education level of women,so that mothers have good nutrition,dietary knowledge and scientific support behavior,so as to comprehensively improve the quality of human capital in the future of China. |
