The influence of parental involvement on students’ non-cognitive abilities in rural ethnic regions of northwest China

The development of children’s non-cognitive abilities is crucial for both individuals and society as a whole. In this study, using a follow-up survey on 5369 primary students in rural ethnic regions of northwest China, we aim to examine the levels of parental involvement in rural ethnic regions and investigate its effect on students’ non-cognitive abilities. Our results show the following: first, parental involvement in rural ethnic regions of northwest China is quite low. Parents pay more attention to their children’s academic performance than to their non-cognitive abilities and the personal involvement is seriously lacking. Second, students from families with more favorable economic status, high parental education levels, non-migrant parents, and primary caregivers who are parents experience higher levels of parental involvement. Though Han students generally have higher maternal involvement and lower paternal involvement than minorities, the ethnic differences are reduced after controlling the covariates. Third, using the value-added model, after controlling for individual, family, class, county and baseline variables, we find that maternal behavioral and personal involvement and paternal cognitive and behavioral involvement have significant positive effects on children’s non-cognitive abilities. We use causal identification methods including propensity score matching and Mahalanobis distance matching to do the robustness test.