Abstract
Resource dilution theory hypothesizes that children’s educational attainment suffers from being raised with many siblings, as the parental resources have to be shared with more children. Based on economic and cultural theories, we hypothesize that resource dilution is gendered: especially a larger number of brothers is harmful to a person’s educational attainment. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, covering 18 European countries, we show that the number of brothers is more negatively related with the odds of obtaining a college degree than the number of sisters. This holds particularly for women. However, this pattern is weaker in countries that are known to have a more gender-egalitarian climate.
Highlights
Many studies have found a negative impact of the number of siblings on children’s educational achievement and attainment
Children’s cognitive development and educational attainment suffer from growing up with larger numbers of siblings because the resources parents offer to their children have to be shared with more offspring [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8], and because the cognitive climate deteriorates if new children enter the family [9,10]
If siblings compete for parental resources, and if parents have a gender bias in the way they invest in children, one would expect that for women, the number of brothers will have a more negative effect on their educational outcomes than the number of sisters
Summary
Many studies have found a negative impact of the number of siblings on children’s educational achievement and attainment. If siblings compete for parental resources, and if parents have a gender bias in the way they invest in children, one would expect that for women, the number of brothers will have a more negative effect on their educational outcomes than the number of sisters. A handful of studies have investigated the separate influence of the number of brothers and sisters but the evidence has not been very supportive [4,15,16,17,18] Because of these ‘disappointing’ research findings, the hypothesis of gender-specific sibsize effects has been abandoned. We provide new evidence in a field with mixed findings, we examine cross-national differences in the effects of brothers and sisters This comparison allows us to examine if effects of the number of children on schooling outcomes vary across societies with different gender role regimes. We examine the comparative question in three ways, by estimating crosslevel interactions in logit models on the pooled data, by using a graphical representation of effects in each country, and by estimating meta-regression models on the country-specific regression coefficients
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