Parents’ Educational Expectations and Children’s Entrepreneurial Choices: Empirical Evidence from a Thousand-village Survey

Zhang Qi, He Xiaogang

Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 46, Issue 12, pp. 72 - 87 (2024)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20231023.402

Summary

Based on the family expectation theory and intergenerational interaction characteristics, this paper examines the relationship between parents’ “educational” expectations and children’s entrepreneurial choices, and the moderating role of three intergenerational dimensions: paternal farming, offspring marriage, and parent-child dispersion.　　This paper adopts data from the “Thousand-village Survey” conducted by Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2016 for empirical analysis. The results show that: Parents’ high expectations for their children make adult children inclined to carry out entrepreneurial activities; paternal farming, offspring marriage, and parent-child dispersion effectively stimulate the family expectation effect and enhance child entrepreneurship; parents’ educational expectations affect the development of their children’s entrepreneurial activities through three paths: altruism transmission, entrepreneurial efficacy generation, and human capital accumulation; parents’ high expectations for their children significantly promote a son’s entrepreneurship, but do not promote a daughter’s entrepreneurship. In addition, the influence of parents’ educational expectations is more obvious in the central and western regions than in the eastern regions.　　The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it shows the current situation of parents’ educational expectations in rural areas of China, and finds out the economic function of family educational expectations, which has strong practical significance in clarifying the importance of traditional family values, cultivating young rural entrepreneurial talents, and formulating talent strategies for the government. Second, it explores the boundaries of family expectation effect, and supports the conclusion that intergenerational relationship has an important impact on children’s economic decision-making, social network expansion, and psychological resilience, providing a theoretical basis for subsequent research. Third, it helps to deeply understand how parents’ high expectations for their children affect individual human capital, as well as the driving effect of kinship on family members’ economic behavior.

Keywords

parents’ high expectations for their children; child entrepreneurship; intergenerational influence; intergenerational interaction; educational human capital