Keeping Families Together –– the Key to Children’s Success

By admin On 2015/04/08 · Add Comment · 2,022 views

Job opportunities have also become more competitive since 1997 as some emigrants and their children returned to Hong Kong in search of better economic opportunities.

In fact, Hong Kong’s real challenge is a shortage of relevant skills, which is detrimental to both economic growth and equality. We need to invest in educational opportunities today to make up for lost time.

Although educational opportunities have been stable over time for each generation as a whole, they are not equal across different families with different backgrounds. An important challenge for society is how to improve the opportunities for those who are born into disadvantage.

It used to be believed that free education for all was a sufficient path to opportunity. However, despite half a century of free education policies in most of the developed world, inequality has not improved. So what is the problem?

Research on the U.S. experience has shown that half the variation in lifetime income inequality is determined before a child enters secondary school. This implies that an early start is needed to help children in disadvantaged families. The issue is how to identify and reach these children.

I analysed intergenerational mobility in schooling attainment in Hong Kong, focusing on young people aged 20-24 years, and found they experienced significant disadvantages if they were recent migrants, their parents were recent migrants and/or they grew up in households with a single parent.

Hong Kong now ranks among the top 10 in the world in terms of crude divorce rates. In 1981, 1.2% of adolescent children aged 11-20 living at home had single parents, similar to those born in the 1960s. But by 2011 the figure had increased nearly tenfold, to 11.7%. The rate of increase was similar for children aged 1-10. These are underestimates because if one of the parents were remarried they would not be counted as living in a single parent household.

Growing up in single parent households in rich countries, like the U.S., has been found to be the single most critical factor compromising a child’s future success.

To illustrate the educational impact here, I found those with no father living at home had a negative impact of more than five percentile ranking on school attainment.

There are other easily identifiable family attributes on which to focus preventive and remedial measures.

Another factor affecting school attainment is homeownership, which is a powerful proxy for household wealth. Children growing up in families who were homeowners, either in the private sector or publicly subsidized sector, had significant schooling attainment advantages compared to those living in rental housing units in the private sector.

However, this advantage started to decline for those living in publicly subsidized owned flats from 2001. Households living in government subsidized homeownership flats have become relatively less well off, probably because their housing wealth has not appreciated by as much as that in the private sector.

School attainment among those living in public rental flats has also fallen. This is probably due to higher divorce rates among the poor, and the changing nature of resident composition in the public housing sector.

Public tenant households are significantly poorer compared to 35 years ago. Divorced men and women are heavily concentrated in public rental housing and by 2011, made up about one-fifth of households living there compared with only one-twentieth in 1981. Hong Kong’s public housing estates are transforming into areas of growing poverty that are unable to motivate our children to higher aspirations. I have grave doubts about the wisdom of continuing to develop more public rental housing units to solve our housing shortage.

A far better solution is to build subsidized homes for ownership so that families have a stake to stay together. By keeping families together, we prevent more children from falling into a state of disadvantage that will be detrimental to their future upward social mobility. Why foster and concentrate the poor and the divorced in publicly subsidized ghettos? Poor children deserve a better deal. A city of homeowners is also less politically divided.

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Keeping Families Together –– the Key to Children’s Success

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