The Effect Of Grandparents’ Care-giving On Family Fertility Decision In China

According to the National Bureau of Statistics,China’s birth rate has been declining since 2000.Although since 2013,gradually implement the "double only two children","two children" alone,2015 and released "comprehensive two children",2021 "a pair of husband and wife can bear three children",but China’s birth rate lower trend has not changed.Population reached replacement level academic circles generally believe that the total fertility rate of 2.1.According to the data of the seventh National population census,the total fertility rate of women of childbearing age in China was only 1.3 in 2020.Low fertility rate has become a realistic problem facing China.Meanwhile,since China entered an aging society at the end of the 20th century,the number and proportion of the elderly population in the total population have continued to grow.In 2019,the elderly population aged 65 and above in China reached 176 million,accounting for 12.57%of the total population.How to realize active aging is also an important issue in current society.Therefore,through in-depth study of elderly grandparents provide care support affect fertility decisions,giving play to the role of grandparents’ care,improving the birth rate and realizing "active aging" will promote the adjustment of population structure and the benign development of society.This paper analyzes the influence of paternal care on actual fertility decision at the level of offspring family.Using the Data of Chinese Family Tracking Survey(CFPS),we investigated the influence of paternal involvement in family care in 2016 on offspring family fertility decision in 2018 to eliminate reverse causal error,and adopted instrumental variables to further solve the problem of missing variables.The study found that paternal care,particularly by grandmothers,increased the likelihood of a family having a child in the next two years by 3.2 percent compared with families without grandparents’ care-giving.After the endogeneity problem was overcome using instrumental variables,the influence of grandmother’s care support on family fertility decisions was further increased.Although paternal care has a positive effect on family reproductive decisions,it is not significant.By grouping regression of different groups,it is found that grandparents’ care plays a greater role in promoting fertility decisions of families with urban hukou,families with female education level of junior high school or below,families with one child in 2016,families with female age between 29 and 35,and middle and low-income families.At the same time,financial support from grandparents had no significant effect on fertility.Maternal care had a greater effect on fertility in families with stable marriages.From the perspective of family structure,the number of children and the number of boys had a significant negative impact on fertility behavior.From the perspective of children’s age structure,0-3 years old children have a significant negative impact on fertility behavior,4-8 years old children have a positive impact on fertility behavior,but not significant;As an important social network,the number of siblings of a spouse has a significant positive impact on reproductive decision-making.Based on the findings of this paper,this study believes that the social value of intergenerational care should be recognized and played,the scientific parenting concept and knowledge of grandparents should be enhanced,and the problem of child care should be alleviated by increasing the effective supply of social care services.