This thesis attempts to use parenting to explain why some children with less educated parents in China can perform as well as children with more educated parents in cognitive ability. Parenting includes (1) parenting practices such as setting rules on children’s behaviors, and (2) everyday teachings that transmit the importance of education and intellectual achievement to children. Parents who attach greater importance to children’s education may employ a more demanding parenting style regarding children’s academic performance and hold higher educational expectation. Such parenting strategies are likely to buffer the impact of parents’ education on children’s cognitive achievement. I used the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) 2012 baseline data to test my hypothesis that paren...[ Read more ]

This thesis attempts to use parenting to explain why some children with less educated parents in China can perform as well as children with more educated parents in cognitive ability. Parenting includes (1) parenting practices such as setting rules on children’s behaviors, and (2) everyday teachings that transmit the importance of education and intellectual achievement to children. Parents who attach greater importance to children’s education may employ a more demanding parenting style regarding children’s academic performance and hold higher educational expectation. Such parenting strategies are likely to buffer the impact of parents’ education on children’s cognitive achievement. I used the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) 2012 baseline data to test my hypothesis that parenting moderates the effects of parents’ education on cognitive performance. The results indicate that: (1) high demandingness and high educational expectation can compensate for disadvantages of low parents’ education; (2) while parental expectation can account for part of the effect of parents’ education, parental demandingness is not a mediator of parents’ education. Furthermore, four-way decomposition analysis suggests that parental demandingness and parental expectation are two significant moderators of parents’ education. They weaken the effects of parents’ education on cognitive ability by 26.8% and 33.4%, respectively.