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Follow us The Effect of Elderly Household Members on School Enrollment of Children in Tibet
Anderson, Barbara A., John H. Romani, Cheong-Seok Kim, John Traphagan, and Jinyun Liu. 1999. "The Effect of Elderly Household Members on School Enrollment of Children in Tibet." PSC Research Report No. 99-438. May 1999.
- Many studies in developed and developing countries are concerned with factors related to the welfare of the elderly. Fewer studies focus on the effect of the elderly on the welfare of other household members. *This paper is concerned with the effect of the presence of an elderly person (age 60 or older) on the chance that a 10- to 14-year-old Tibetan child in Tibet in 1995 attends school. *Some have posited that the presence of elderly relatives in the household inhibits social change, including schooling, both due to a conservative influence on attitudes and preferences in the household, and due to the use of scarce household resources for the elderly. Others have posited that older relatives, especially relatively healthy older women, can facilitate schooling of children by taking over some of the parents' duties. *Tibet in 1995 is at a very low development level, with 40% of Tibetan children age 10-14 in school - 48% for boys and 32% for girls. *Extended families in Tibet are common; 88% of those age 60 or older live in vertically extended families. However, due to the steepness of the age structure, only 38% of children age 10-14 live in a household that includes a person age 60+. *Being a boy, having a literate adult in the household, living in an urban area, and living in a place with relatively high availability of schooling are positively related to a child attending school. Living in an agricultural household or living in a family engaged in animal husbandry (pastoral nomads) are related to less chance of being in school. *For both girls and boys, the more brothers a child has, the less likely that child is to go to school. For girls, the more sisters the less likely is school enrollment, while for boys, the more sisters, the more likely is school enrollment. *The presence of a relative age 60 or older in the household has a mixed effect on school enrollment. By itself the presence of a person over age sixty in the household has no effect on the school enrollment of boys but a negative effect on the school enrollment of girls. However, if there is a woman in her early sixties in the household the changes of a girl being in school are significantly increased, while there is no effect on school enrollment of boys. *There is some support for both hypotheses. Presence of an elderly person in the household is irrelevant to whether a boy is in school. Whether the presence of an elderly person inhibits or promotes schooling for a girl depends on the age and gender of the elderly household member.
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