A Study Of The Effect Of Family Structure On Rural Children’s Academic Achievement

Rural education is an important fulcrum of the rural revitalization strategy.At the time of consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty eradication and rural revitalization,it is imperative to make efforts to ensure the equity of rural compulsory education.Family structure is closely related to education development.Along with social transformation,China’s family structure has undergone profound changes.Single-parent families due to marriage dissolution and direct intergenerational families due to incomplete population mobility,left-behind families and mobile families have grown significantly,especially in rural areas.Academic achievement is an important criterion for educational development,and the impact of family structure deficits and disconnection on children’s academic achievement is an important topic of academic concern.However,most studies have examined the effect of family structure on children’s academic achievement in rural areas only at the level of household registration,lacking distinction and further analysis between children whose household registration and residence are both rural and those whose household registration and residence are separated from urban and rural areas.In terms of the mechanisms of family structure on rural children’s academic achievement,most of the existing studies also focus on the paternal level,and not enough attention has been paid to the more proximal transmission pathways at the offspring level,and there are few studies that include non-cognitive abilities and peer quality in the intermediate transmission mechanisms.Based on this,this study examines the impact of family structure on rural children’s academic achievement and its mechanisms of action by using CEPS 2014-2015 data to construct a multilevel model and combining data from in-depth interviews conducted in July 2022 in rural areas of southwestern Lu and November 2022 in central southern Gan in China as the study population and further distinguishing between urban and rural residence.The study found that:Firstly,in terms of the distributional characteristics and causes of family structure.First,the family structure of rural children was diversified,but one fifth of children still had a deficient or discrete family structure.Second,children with both household registration and residence in rural areas and those with lower family socioeconomic status were more likely to have a deficient or discrete family structure.Secondly,with respect to the effect of family structure on academic achievement.First,maternal absence and two-parent absence had a significant negative effect on rural children’s academic achievement,while paternal absence had no significant effect on rural children’s academic achievement.Second,there were also significant urban-rural differences in the effects of family structure on rural children’s academic achievement.Finally,with regard to the mechanisms of the effect of family structure on academic achievement.First,non-cognitive ability mediated the relationship between family structure and rural children’s academic achievement.Second,peer quality mediated the relationship between family structure and rural children’s academic achievement.The above findings suggest that families at the bottom of the social hierarchy are more likely to have a deficient or discrete family structure,and the absence or prolonged absence of parents leads to incomplete family upbringing,which constrains the offspring’s access to and use of resources,which in turn leads to the differentiation of the offspring’s own non-cognitive abilities and the quality of the peer group with which they interact,and the transmission of disadvantage further affects individual academic achievement.In other words,the educational inequality of the offspring is to a certain extent a reproduction of the social class inequality of the father’s generation,in which the non-cognitive ability and peer quality of the offspring act as an important bridge.Due to the imbalance between urban and rural development,the class inequality of the father’s generation is also superimposed on the inequality of urban and rural communities,especially for children who are both domiciled and residing in rural areas.The insight of this study is that the production process of educational inequality among offspring can be identified and thus targeted family,school,and social interventions can be made on this basis.Institutionalization should be used to accelerate the development of quality and balanced compulsory education in the county,further deepen the reform of the household registration system,create more local high-quality employment opportunities through industrial revitalization,increase attention and policy support for children and mothers with both household registration and residence in rural areas,strengthen the cultivation of children’s non-cognitive abilities,and accelerate the reform and governance of the compulsory education school district system.