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Within individual countries, the paths towards increasing educational attainment are not always linear and individuals are not equally affected. Differences between boys’ and girls’ educational attainments are a common expression of this inequality as boys are more often favored for continued schooling. We examine the importance of birth cohort, sibship size, migration, and school accessibility for explaining both the gender gap and its narrowing in secondary schooling in one district in Northeast Thailand between 1984 and 1994. Birth cohort is a significant explanation for the narrowing of the gender gap. Migration, sibship size, and remote village location are important explanations for limited secondary education opportunities, especially for girls.

Although there has been much psychological research about children's sibling relations, it has been a neglected area of study in sociology (exceptions are Brannen et al., 2000; Kosonen, 1996; Mauthner, 2002). This paper, based on empirical research on siblings in Scotland, explores the nature of the generational power structure within families from children's perspectives. Childhood is a relational concept which forms part of the generational order. Alanen explains this as “a complex set of social processes through which people become (are constructed as) ‘children’ while other people become (are constructed as) ‘adults’” (2001, pp. 20, 21). Generational processes shape the nature of child-parent relations (Mayall, 2002). Alanen states that:one position (such as the parental position) cannot exist without the other (child) position; also what parenting is – that is, action in the position of a parent – is dependent on its relation to the action “performed” in the child position, and a change in one part is tied to change in the other (Alanen, 2001, p. 19).In other words, child-parent relations are based on the understanding that childhood is relational with parenthood (see also Mayall, 2002). Alanen (2001) argues that the social construction of childhood and adulthood involves a process, including the agency of both children and adults, which she refers to as a set of “practices”:It is through such practices that the two generational categories of children and adults are recurrently produced and therefore they stand in relations of connection and interaction, of interdependence (Alanen, 2001, p. 21).These practices of generationing may be “childing” practices through which people are constructed as children or “adulting” practices through which a distinct adult position is produced. The ways in which children in the present study talked about the differences between their relationships with their parents and their siblings indicated that there are a range of generationing practices that take place within families. They referred to particular kinds of behaviour that were acceptable to engage in with other children (in this case with their siblings) but not with their parents. Overwhelmingly the key issue which children highlighted as distinct between their relations with parents and siblings was the differential nature of power in these relationships. Whilst it is not surprising that children perceive the distribution of power to be more unequal between children and parents than between siblings, the aim of this paper is to explore the nature of this power and how it is experienced from children's point of view. In particular the paper discusses the ways in which children perceive child-parent relations compared with their sibling relationships in relation to the giving and receiving of power within the home.

Using data from the British National Childhood Development Study, this paper examines the quality–quantity trade-off in fertility in multiple measures of child achievement. The results exhibit three characteristics: (1) Family-size effects appear very early in child development – as early as age two; (2) the effects are found in a broad array of achievement measures: labor market, cognitive, physical, and social; and (3) by age 16, the effects of family size stop growing (and what little evidence there is of change after that is not consistently in one direction). The paper argues that these results are inconsistent with preference-based explanations of the trade-off and point to some family-resource constraint. However, the relevant constraint appears more likely to be temporal than financial.

Thailand’s modernization and shift to a wage labor economy has led to increases in children’s educational attainment. This research, in two rural northern Thai villages, explores globalizing labor markets, traditional familial roles, and parental bias of educational investment by children’s gender and birth position, using a human behavioral ecology (HBE) framework. Survival models suggest that northern Thailand’s matrilineal tendencies may be increasing, not decreasing, with globalization: daughters bearing long-term expectations of support and remittance are more heavily invested in than sons, from whom matrilines expect and receive less. Birth position strongly affects educational attainment, reflecting differential familial helper and provider roles.

Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is well established, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship is limited. This chapter applies a recently developed nonparametric estimator of the conditional local average treatment effect to assess the sensitivity of the quantity–quality trade-off to functional form and parametric assumptions. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of fertility, we find mixed evidence supporting the trade-off.

By using ethnographic data and family interviews from eight families in Taipei, Taiwan, this paper aims to delineate how multigenerational families implement parents’ child-rearing values, and how these strategies vary by social class. The primary focus is the child’s mother and her relationship with other family members. I ask the following question: How does a mother in a three-generation family implement her ideal parenting values for her child while being encumbered by the constraints of her parents-in-law? Additionally, how does this intergenerational dynamic vary with family socioeconomic status? To conceptualize this process in such a complex context, I argue that we must understand parenting behaviors as acts of “doing family” and “intensive mothering.”

From 2008 to 2009, I conducted a pilot survey in two public elementary schools to recruit the parents of sixth-grade students. All eight cases of multigenerational families in this paper were selected randomly after being clustered by the parent’s highest education level and family income levels. This paper utilized the mothers’ interviews as the major source to analyze, while the interviews of other family members served as supplementary data.

Two cases, Mrs Lee and Mrs Su’s stories, were selected here to illustrate two distinctive approaches toward childrearing in multi-generational families. Results indicate that white-collar mothers in Taiwan hold the value of concerted cultivation and usually picture the concept of intensive mothering as their ideal image of parenthood. Yet, such an ideal and more westernized child-rearing philosophy often leads to tensions at home, particularly between the mother and the mother-in-law. Meanwhile, blue-collar mothers tend to collaborate with grandparents in sharing childcare responsibilities, and oftentimes experience friction over child discipline in terms of doing homework and material consumption.

Via this analysis of three-generation families in Taiwan, we are able to witness the struggle of contemporary motherhood in East Asia. This paper foregrounds the negotiations that these mothers undertake in defining ideal parenting and the ideal family. On the one hand, these mothers must encounter the new parenting culture, given that the cultural ideal of concerted cultivation has become a popular ideology. On the other hand, by playing the role of daughter-in-law, they must negotiate within the conventional, patriarchal family norms.

Twelve percent of families in the United States have a child with a disability, yet little is known about the long-term consequences of growing up with a disabled sibling. This study builds on previous research regarding disability effects on families and offers an additional view on the linked lives of families and, in particular, siblings. Using secondary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, this study examines the odds of college completion among young adults with a disabled sibling during childhood. Specifically, I examine the gender differences among those who had a sibling with a disability. Women are more than 35% less likely to complete college if they had a disabled sibling during childhood; there is no significant difference by sibling disability status for boys. To understand whether children in low-resourced families are particularly penalized by having a disabled sibling, I examine whether various family resources attenuate the low graduation odds among those who had a disabled sibling. I find that having stably married parents during childhood largely eliminates the college completion gap between those with and without a disabled sibling. However, increases in mothers' education or family income do not attenuate the college completion gap. By identifying this gender disadvantage in college completion, this study shows that disabilities have consequences not just for disabled individuals but for their siblings as well, shining a light on a hidden cost of disability on families.

The issue of dropout looms large in the context of school education in India despite various flagship programs that have been initiated in school education. According to U-DISE report (2019–2020), girls drop out more than boys at the upper primary level. An analysis of the dropout problem demands probing deeper into intrahousehold dynamics that involves bargaining at the household level on investment decision. These decisions are often influenced by the social context in which the girl child in the family faces discrimination which gets reflected in terms of dropout of girl children. Apart from the issue of gender, birth order also determines which child is more likely to drop out. Using NSSO data (2017–2018), we observe that not all children of a household are equally susceptible to the dropout problem. Moreover, the eldest sibling is found to be more susceptible to the dropout problem and dropout rate goes down with the other younger siblings in the same household. First-born girl children drop out more than their male counterparts showing gender bias. The chapter concludes that the factors pushing a child to drop out become more effective for the eldest sibling. The major reason is the family structure of India as the eldest sibling is expected to be more responsible and look after other younger siblings. Consequently, a certain number of the younger siblings try to follow the elder siblings and discontinue going to school.