會議論文
| 學年 | 101 |
|---|---|
| 學期 | 2 |
| 發表日期 | 2013-07-12 |
| 作品名稱 | Parental Rights and Responsibilities of Chilean Women: A Study of Child Education Arrangement for Different Marital Status |
| 作品名稱（其他語言） | |
| 著者 | Lin, Chin-Ming; Wang, Ofelia Pei-Chung; Kuo, Carolina Yi-Chun |
| 作品所屬單位 | 淡江大學亞洲研究所 |
| 出版者 | |
| 會議名稱 | International Association for Feminist Economics 22nd IAFFE Annual Conference |
| 會議地點 | Palo Alto, California, USA |
| 摘要 | Family life in Latin America in general, and in Chile in Particular, is changing rapidly as it is in other Western countries. A very important factor for the change in family structure and, as a consequence, in gender role in the family, is the changing marital status. When the proportions of cohabiting and single‐parent households increased, family resource arrangement may also be expected to change as we have to reconsider the parental rights and responsibilities. In this paper, we will focus on parental commitment in children’s education attainment. Specifically, we want to find out if there are significant differences in children’s education resource arrangement for three types of union status—marriage (all kinds), consensual unions, and other (visiting unions and single parents). A society wants to maximize its return from investing in education. Basically, the return from education investment is decided by family income (I) and personal ability (A). Therefore, Y = Y(I,A|Z), where Y is return from education investment, and Z is parameter affecting the effectiveness of education investment. Altruistic parents concern their own consumption and their children’s future income, so they may assist children’s education through investing part of their current income or direct transfer. The format of assistance is related to social institutions, wherein parents may let their children receive general and public education provided by the government with revenues from taxation, or they may opt to let their children receive private education with their own financial resources. In this sense, families are investors who will affect their children’s future labor income more or less dependent on the level of their investment. On the other hand, people are born with different abilities which could be revealed as they enter labor force after receiving education resources. Thus, a person’s wage income in labor force (W) will be determined by the level of his/her education training (E) and born abilities (A): W = W(E,A), given the assumption that the more abled person can earn a higher future income by means of education. This also implies that a person with higher ability is more motivated to acquire resources just because he/she is assured higher education returns.1 As for the factors that affect education returns other than family income and born abilities, we will look particularly at family structures. Marriage is a very important factor related to the transformation of family structures. Through years, marriage rate has been declining in Chile, with a proportion of 52% for married women of reproductive ages in 1970 declined to a proportion of 43% in 2002. At the same time, cohabitation grew three times from only a proportion of 3% in 1970 to 11% in 2002. The proportion of cohabiters, though, is still low compared to other Latin American countries, such as Colombia or Honduras, where about 60% of women of reproductive ages were cohabiting in 2005. A novelty that has been pointed out, though , is that, since the 1990’s, cohabitation started to increase among groups of high socioeconomic status in Chile—which could mean a new type of cohabitation is emerging, a cohabitation that may start to reverse the prevalence of the traditional Latin American nuptial system in Chile. Furthermore, there has been an increase in the proportion of single women. In 1970, 56% of women in the 20‐24 age interval were single, a proportion that grew to 67% in 2002. The fact that more women remain single until later in their lives is reflected in an older mean age at marriage, which was 23.5 in 1960, but went up to 26.7 years in 2004. At the same time that the proportion of married couple declined in Chile, the proportion of children born outside of marriage increased from 16% in 1960 to 68% in 2010. This not only means that marriage is not the preferred setting for childbearing anymore, but also that non‐marital births are proportionally higher in Chile than in Sweden where they reached 55% in 2008. It is also higher than in the U.S. where it reached 38.5% in 2008. Both the decline of marriage and the increase of proportion of children born outside of marriage may have been affected by two legal changes that were introduced in Chile in the last decade. In 1996, a new ley de filiacion (paternity law) was passed, ruling out the differences between children born within and outside of marriage, in terms of heritage rights, food and support rights, and the right to use their fathers’ last name. In 2004, the first divorce law was enacted in Chile. Before that people willing to end their marriage could nullify the union, but the process was costly in terms of time and money, and therefore very hard to follow for the poor. One may hypothesize that the paternity law may have stimulated the decline of marriage, 1 See Daniele Checci, The Economics of Education: Human Capital, Family Background and Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Chapter 5. since legally being born inside of marriage does not carry an advantage anymore. Passing a divorce law, on the contrary, could in principle have stimulated marriage among couples who were not sure about making a life‐long commitment, since it makes it easier to put an end to an unsatisfactory union. Among the other socioeconomic constraints which will affect intergenerational transfer within the family, we look at work‐family conflict which is of particular relevance for women, as motherhood embedded in them being deemed so significant in Latin American countries. Many women entered workplace to supplement family income in order to support their children’s education. However, this caused a conflict between women’s roles as housewives and income earners. Consideration on social strata will have to be put in place to determine how women in Chile to balance between the above two roles and, therefore, how children fared in their education achievement. Generally, women of lower social strata in Chile opted to play the role of housewives or take part‐time jobs to fulfill their motherhood roles. However, this would cause a great dilemma if they happened to be single mother and could not afford to stay at home. In any way, the last two cases would result in vicious circle which will put their children in perilous status toward their education achievement. Another key research question is how public policies regarding families in Chile, such as its extensive school voucher system, are changing and will they be sufficient for meeting the demands of the so‐called “second demographic transition”. Combined with consideration on marital and family structures, a preliminary conclusion is reached that government would have to deal with social customs as emanating from religious instructions and traditional believes which are deeply embedded in Chilean society emphasizing motherhood instead of parenthood. The latter will loom large if children’s discipline and educational achievement are deemed more important as responsibilities for both parents, as against the caring role for women which is emphasized in motherhood conceptualization. |
| 關鍵字 | marital status;gender roles;motherhood;work-family conflict;education investment |
| 語言 | en |
| 收錄於 | |
| 會議性質 | 國際 |
| 校內研討會地點 | |
| 研討會時間 | 20130712~20130714 |
| 通訊作者 | |
| 國別 | |
| 公開徵稿 | Y |
| 出版型式 | 紙本 電子版 |
| 出處 | International Association for Feminist Economics 22nd IAFFE Annual Conference, 15p. |
| 相關連結 |
機構典藏連結 ( http://tkuir.lib.tku.edu.tw:8080/dspace/handle/987654321/92440 ) |