The role of maternal education in child health: evidence from China​

Abstract

Children healthcare and gender discrimination are a real challenge to China in the process of achieving its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this study, we investigate the influence of mothers’ education on the health status of their children in the context of China. The data are derived from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) which comprises information from 16,000 households and individuals collected from 25 provinces across China except for autonomous zones. The result shows that maternal education strength affects children’s health, and household wealth as well as gender and living area slightly impact on child health. The study is one of the first research to estimate the influence of maternal education on child health by quantile regression while the historical papers used OLS or fixed effect to research those influences. Quantile regression is employed to analyze the impacts of mothers’ education on child health under different quantiles of the child’s body index variable.