Eighteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Parental unemployment, a typical stressful family event, has been found to have spillover effects on children’s development. However, there is only limited empirical research on the impacts of parental employment on children’s internet use time and most existing studies are conducted on a cross-sectional analysis, which leads to a risk of bias caused by the unobserved variables and thus makes causal inference impossible. This study seeks to determine whether parental unemployment has a significant effect on children’s internet use time, employing a difference-in-differences design combined with a fixed effect to control for unobserved variables. This study utilized data from the 2013-2015 China Education Panel Survey. Based on baseline regression and robustness tests, evidence suggests that it is maternal rather than paternal unemployment that significantly increases children’s internet use time. Moreover, a mechanism analysis shows that the mother-child relationship partly mediates the relationship between maternal unemployment and children’s internet use time.