Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments December 21, 2022 erstellt
Beschreibung:
The phenomenon of parents’ Middle-School Blues is widespread yet often overlooked. We find that parental mental health is “V-shaped” throughout children’s developmental stages, reaching its nadir during middle school. We then leverage data from a four-month parental involvement program on empathy and positive parenting conducted in Chinese middle schools. We find the intervention has a significant positive effect on parental mental health, measured by GHQ-12 score, by 0.17 standard deviation. The effect is large enough to help parents combat Middle-School Blues. We attribute the program’s effect on mental health to the improvement in parental skills, time inputs, and children’s non-cognitive ability. Through a mediation analysis, we find these three factors interact and account for over 62% of the total program effects, and that the improvement in parental skills is the key driver of promoting parental mental health. Finally, our program requires only $21.5 per class to prevent one depression incident and $18 to improve parents’ mental health by 0.1 standard deviation, suggesting the feasibility of scaling up