A Study On The Relationship Between Family Parenting Style And Cognitive Development Of Preschool Children In Poor Rural Areas Of Western China

Human capital is an important driving force for technological innovation and sustainable economic development.The economic growth will mainly depend on the quality of human capital in the future.Improving the quality of human capital requires grasping the rules and characteristics of children's development at different ages.Studies have shown that early childhood is a critical period for human capital,which not only affects the lifetime of individuals but also is significance for social development.From the perspective of personal and social return on investment,early childhood is the highest.Parenting style plays an important role of early childhood human capital.Parenting style is a comprehensive expression of parents' behaviors,attitudes,concepts,and emotional expressions of children,reflecting the essence of parent-child relationships.According to the most commonly used typology in social sciences,parenting styles are categorized as“authoritarian,authoritative,Neglecting and permissive”.Authoritative parenting is characterized by emotional supportiveness,limit setting,and firm yet responsive disciplinary strategies.Conversely,authoritarian parenting is characterized by strong control and limited emotional support and responsiveness.Neglecting parents minimize parenting effort.In contrast,permissive parents do spend effort on parenting,but they do so solely in order to increase the child's choice set and utility.According to the term of parents' interference with the child's choice,researchers define authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles as intense parenting.Chinese parents pay more attention to their children and tend to adopt intense parenting.While authoritative parenting is consistently associated with positive educational,social,emotional,and cognitive developmental outcomes in children.Conversely,authoritarian parenting is typically linked with poorer child outcomes.The relationship between parenting style and preschool children in rural China still needs to be studied.On one hand,the relationship between authoritarian parenting and child development is controversial.Parents,on the other hand,may adopt more than one parenting styles when treating their children.However,there are currently few studies on the cognitive development of preschool children with different combinations of parenting styles.In addition,previous studies were mainly focused on urban areas,while there were few related studies in rural areas.Based on the understanding of early childhood development and parenting styles,this article analyzes the influence of parenting styles on cognitive development of preschool children in rural western China areas.This paper uses the data of nutrition intervention projects carried out by Center of Experimental Economics in Education of Shaanxi Normal University in 11 nationally-designated poverty counties in the Qinba Mountain Area.First,the author analyzes the relationship between authoritative or authoritarian parenting style and cognitive development of preschool children.Then analyzes the impact of different combinations of parenting styles on preschool children.the author also solves the problem of mutual causality,and use propensity score matching to deal with endogenous problems.Finally,a robust test and heterogeneity analysis are performed.The main conclusions of this article are as follows:(1)The early childhood children are not developing to their full potential.(2)The scores of authoritative parenting are higher than authoritarian parenting.In other words,parents in our sample show much warmth and involvement in their parenting and seldom rejected and punished their children.(3)There is significant correlation between parenting style and preschool children's cognitive development.(4)Parenting style had significantly heterogeneous impact on preschool child with parents'educational expectation,child's gender and whether the primary caregiver is a mother.According to the research results of this paper,the author puts forward the following suggestions:Firstly,the importance of early cognitive development of children should be publicized through various channels to improve the awareness of family rearing.Secondly,relevant departments should then provide nurturing knowledge suitable for rural families.Including the advantages of authoritative parenting and the disadvantages of authoritarian parenting.Improve parenting quality and reduce inappropriate parenting practices.