ABSTRACT

Intergenerational transmission theory points out that parents with high-quality capital will pass on their own high-quality capital to their offspring through a certain mechanism to achieve intergenerational transmission of high-quality capital. Starting from the family aspect, this paper empirically analyzes the influence of parents’ educational attainment on their children’s non-cognitive ability and the mechanism of influence, and explores how parents should more effectively improve their children’s non-cognitive ability through investment in the family. Using CFPS data in 2016, the parents’ educational attainment level was empirically analyzed on the children’s noncognitive ability, and the empirical results showed that the influence of the mother’s educational attainment on the children’s non-cognitive ability was positive and significant. Mothers improve their children’s non-cognitive abilities primarily by improving their children’s health. From the regression coefficient of the instrumental variable, each level of maternal education level increased the child’s non-cognitive ability by 0.0877. In this paper, we innovatively studied the influence mechanism between parental education level and children’s non-cognitive ability, explaining the differences in the influence of father and mother’s educational level on children’s non-cognitive ability, and mothers improving their children’s non-cognitive ability by improving their children’s health status. This paper uses the maximum years of education of the child’s maternal grandparents as an instrumental variable to solve the endogenous problems in the model to improve the accuracy and credibility of the article.