1. Introduction
It has long been recognized that family social class or socioeconomic status (SES) greatly impacts child development, laying the foundation for growth, change, and functioning throughout life. Numerous studies have confirmed that family background and contexts play a salient—possibly the most important—socio-environmental role across children’s life domains in contributing to their physical, emotional, psychological, behavioral, and cognitive and educational outcomes (
Coleman 1966;
Duncan and Magnuson 2012;
Mare 1981;
Morris et al. 2007;
Poulain et al. 2019;
Wen 2017). In turn, family-based disparities in developmental trajectories shape children’s differential human capital formation and SES achievement in adulthood, which facilitate intergenerational status reproduction and exacerbate inequalities (
Duncan et al. 2010). A key aspect of the original family background is parental SES. How family structural origin affects children’s learning behaviors and academic performance is a central concern in studies on social mobility and stratification (e.g.,
Black and Devereux 2011;
Solon 1999), child development (e.g.,
Repetti et al. 2002;
Wen and Lin 2012), and education research (e.g.,
Bailey and Dynarksi 2011;
Lareau 2002).
Educational and cognitive outcomes in childhood are important because they constitute the backbone of human capital and predict adulthood status and life quality as measured by a wide range of indicators such as SES, marriage, family, and health (
Adler 2013;
Hackman et al. 2010;
Kell et al. 2013;
Torr 2011). Recent evidence shows that over half of the family level variation in a child’s SES is attributed to parental SES (
Erola et al. 2016). In addition, the “socioeconomic achievement gap”—the disparity in academic achievement between students from high- and low-SES backgrounds—has increased across the globe in the past 50 years despite increased accessibility to formal schooling (
Chmielewski 2019). The existence of significant disparities in socially important attributes associated with family origin has drawn the attention of researchers and policy makers to the “challenge of the gradient,” as they undermine social justice and impede upward mobility (
Adler 2013;
Jackson 2013). To date, studies have progressed from describing associations between family SES and children’s success in school and adult life to identifying mechanisms by which these associations occur. That said, most evidence is based on samples collected in the U.S. or other developed countries. Given that a key proposed pathway linking family SES to children’s educational and cognitive outcomes is the culturally based home environment (
Lareau 1987,
2002), it is important to examine these associations in specific settings.
In addition, different indicators of family SES such as parental education and family income are often conceptualized interchangeably, although they likely lead to different strength in inheritance of status and operate via different mechanisms (
Erola et al. 2016). Another problem with many studies is that they are narrowly focused on one outcome and/or one dynamic inside one setting, despite the fact that children are enmeshed in various ecosystems and influenced simultaneously by external forces in multiple environments (
Bronfenbrenner 1979). Building the evidence based on the importance of specific aspects of family socioeconomic background is a crucial first step toward developing effective interventions targeting the mediating pathways to reduce persistent disparities.
This article addresses these questions in China. Leveraging data from a recent nationally representative school survey of Chinese 7th and 9th graders, the current study attempts to fill these gaps through an analysis of the associations between family income and student academic performance, cognitive ability, and study attitude and behavior as well as through further statistical analysis of the multidimensional pathways underlying these associations. In so doing, it casts light upon the patterns and mediators of the intergenerational transmission of advantage or disadvantage in general, and family income effects on adolescent educational and cognitive outcomes in specific, in the Chinese setting.
5. Discussion
Capitalizing on recent data from the China Education Panel Survey, the present study was designed to examine the role of family income in contributing to educational and cognitive outcomes among Chinese adolescents and explore four categories of mechanisms underlying these associations. As hypothesized, family income was linked directly to school grades, cognitive ability, and study attitude, as well as indirectly via some or all of these mechanisms depending on the specific outcome. The key take-home message is that home environments constitute a prominent setting outside of school exerting powerful influences shaping school outcomes. As far as we know, this is the first study conducted in China to test a comprehensive conceptual model of absolute and relative family income on adolescents’ academic performance, cognitive ability, and attitude and behavior toward school work, which are known predictors of educational achievement and status attainment in adulthood (
Berger et al. 2009). As such, this research corroborates and augments the status-attainment model among Chinese adolescents and provides novel evidence contributing to the current debate about the patterns and sources of intergenerational transmission of family advantage or disadvantage via children’s academic and cognitive achievement.
Our sample consisted of 7th and 9th graders recruited from junior high schools in China. For school grades, cognitive ability, and study attitude, both absolute income and relative income were significant. Hence, assuming the observed income effects are causal, these findings confirm that being rich as well as being richer than others (as perceived by the parent) improve adolescents’ educational and cognitive outcomes, thereby facilitating the intergenerational transmission of status. Moreover, we found that absolute income seemed to be more consistently and more strongly linked to our outcomes than relative income. Previous work has shown that absolute rather than relative income is a better socioeconomic predictor of physical or objective wellbeing outcomes (
Fisk and Merlo 2017;
Joseph et al. 2018), whereas changes in relative income have larger effects on emotional or subjective well-being outcomes than do changes in absolute income (
Ball and Chernova 2008;
Zhou et al. 2019). The explanations for absolute income effects emphasize materialistic or monetary mechanisms, while those for relative income highlight the psychosocial pathways related to perceived relative deprivation and consequent social comparison (
Adler 2013). Research on the impact of absolute and relative family income on educational and cognitive outcomes is scarce among the Chinese youth population, but is needed to enrich insights into the related theories and the policies or interventions that aim to improve them (
Luo et al. 2018). Our finding that absolute income is a stronger predictor than relative income may testify to the significance of materialistic or monetary resources as critical mechanisms.
Indeed, home amenities, that is, measuring home-based material resources, played the largest mediating role in explaining family income effects on cognitive ability and study attitude. Higher values in the variable of home amenities indicated better living conditions (i.e., having faucet water and modern, private bathrooms) and home products directly promoting cognitive development and school engagement (i.e., availability of a study desk, many books, a computer, and internet access). In our ad hoc analysis, we simultaneously examined the effects of the seven items constituting the home amenity variable and found the coefficients of all, except for computers, were both positive and highly significant after the control variables including parental education were adjusted for, and when internet was taken out of the equation, the computer coefficient also became highly significant (data not shown). Consistent with the family’s human capital investment perspectives (
Becker and Tomes 1986), these findings suggest that ensuring basic living standards and providing relatively inexpensive educational products such as desks and books, as well as making a computer and internet available, are efficient steps parents can take to promote their children’s cognitive development and study attitude. Presumably these material resources are not only important in their own right but also good proxies for family expenditures on a variety of cognitively stimulating goods and services that enhance their children’s learning and skill- and credential-building.
Surprisingly, the home amenity variable was not significantly linked to school grades, which was a measure for academic performance. The nonsignificant effect might have been driven by a few countervailing factors. On the one hand, a large and diverse body of research has revealed the benefits of a positive physical environment, including good housing conditions, on child development (
Evans 2006). On the other hand, the relationship between the use of computers and/or internet and student academic performance is complex. While academic benefits of computer or internet use at school or at home have been reported (
Bodhi and Kaur 2017), research has also found that using computer devices in the classroom (
Carter et al. 2017) and excessive recreational internet use (
Camerini et al. 2018;
Islam et al. 2018) are correlated with impaired academic performance. The academic impacts of computer and/or internet use likely depend on the intensity, purpose, and setting of the use. More research is warranted to investigate the relationship between child development and the physical and material environment in China.
Among the non-monetary or intangible intervening factors, the adolescent’s own educational aspiration was the most important mechanism exhibiting the largest mediating effect for family income impacts on school grades and the second largest for cognitive ability and study attitude. Its positive main effects were also significant and consistent in all the outcomes we examined net of the control variables and the other mediators. These findings lend strong support to the theories that highlight the salient role of children’s “own voice” and “own volition” in contributing to their developmental trajectories (
Bandura 2001;
Haring et al. 2019). In this view, children should not be considered a “blank slate” on to which adult wishes or society’s expectations are projected; rather, children are able to exert intrapersonal influences (
Bandura 2018;
Haring et al. 2019). That is, to varying degrees in different contexts, children have the ability to develop and express their own thoughts, make their own decisions, and act on their own behalf to control their own lives. Meanwhile, researchers are recommended to be mindful of how agency is socio-culturally conditioned and that multilevel environmental forces intersect to shape this agency (
Huijsmans 2011;
Kumpulainen et al. 2014). The current study shows that higher family SES is positively correlated with higher educational aspiration, but we were not able to investigate pathways linking these structural positions to educational aspiration. Future research should pay more attention to studying determinants of agency outcomes such as educational aspiration, self-regulation, and self-efficacy to provide evidence on how family, education, and community regimes can work together to form supportive social contexts promoting children’s sense of agency that enables their socio-emotional well-being and status attainment in adulthood (
Hilppö et al. 2016).
The influence of peers should not be ignored either. We found having many close friends at school who aspire to go to college was a beneficial contributor to these cognitive and educational outcomes independent of a wide range of covariates, including the student’s own educational aspiration. It also emerged as one of the top four most powerful mediators explaining the family income effect in this study. In other words, our research documents the existence of the effects of peer agency over and above the child’s own agency in a national sample of Chinese adolescents. One implication of the observed school peer influence is that sorting across schools or classrooms within schools by prior cognitive ability could exacerbate educational inequalities, and consequently reinforce existing disadvantage, due to the multiplier effects of peer influence (
Dickerson et al. 2018). That said, endogeneity in peer influence exists because like-minded individuals tend to be drawn to each other and form friendship groups. The causality, magnitude, composition, and determinants of these peer effects need to be further studied in Chinese contexts.
Another important result from this research is that family income matters for parenting practices, which is inconsistent with the previous hypothesis and finding that the SES-parenting link is weak in Confucianism-dominant cultures due to the nearly universal high educational aspiration and parental willingness to invest in children’s education (
Li and Xie 2020;
Liu and Xie 2015). Both absolute income and relative income were positively and significantly associated with parent-child communication and closeness. It is plausible that family economic resources facilitate frequent sharing of thoughts and feelings, enhance relational closeness between the parent and the child, and in turn promote children’s cognitive and educational outcomes. In this sequence, mother-child communication stood out to be the most important mediator, with father-child closeness being the least important. While we cannot thus conclude that the mother is a more important parent than the father for child development, this finding clearly underscores the critical role of mothering in cultivating children’s cognitive and educational potential. Few studies on parenting have incorporated gender perspectives in the Chinese settings. It would be informative to understand differential developmental implications of mothering versus fathering to more effectively support families from disadvantaged environments.
Consistent with prior studies (
Reynolds et al. 2014;
West et al. 2013), harmonious parent-child and between-parent relationships were also found to be beneficial even after SES factors were accounted for. This result reinforces the developmental significance of non-monetary family assets. Interestingly, the main and mediating effects of these relational factors were larger for study attitude than for more objective outcomes such as school grades and cognitive ability. Facing the stronger and more consistent main and mediating effects of home amenities, own and peer educational aspiration, and mother-child communication, perhaps harmonious family relationships per se are not sufficient to boost children’s cognitive and educational development, but they definitely accord added value to these outcomes.
Due to the nature of the cross-sectional observational study design, it is difficult to derive causal relationships from these findings. Our measures were all based on self-reports, which are inevitably subjected to response bias due to issues such as participants’ memory loss and information bias due to social desirability tendency. In addition, despite drawing on a comprehensive conceptual model, our measurement was thin on child agency and peer influence, and school and neighborhood effects were completely omitted. While it can be expected that the ecological systems theory of child development (
Bronfenbrenner 1979) should be applicable to various cultural settings, empirically testing it can prove challenging due to its complexity. Prior work conducted in the U.S. showed family was more influential than school and neighborhood contexts in influencing youth risky behavior (
Wen 2017). We urge researchers in the future to investigate the relative effects of child agency as well as the contexts of families, schools, communities, and peers on socio-emotional well-being, cognitive development, and socioeconomic outcomes in China.