Public Choices, Private Decisions: Sexual and Reproductive Health ...

64 Sexual and Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals
There is
a strong
incentive
for larger
families to
keep children,
especially
girls, at home
and out of
school
Most empirical studies on educational attainment in countries where family
size has been on the decline have found that a child’s school attainment is negatively
associated with the number of siblings with whom the child lives (National
Research Council and Institute of Medicine 2005). Throughout the 1990s this
relationship was investigated in a number of developing countries, and this result
was often found to be the case (though the size and statistical significance of this
relationship varied greatly between settings) (Lloyd 1994).
There is also evidence from these studies that the gender gap in educational
attainment may be explained by parental preference for sending boys to school
when a family has limited resources (National Research Council and Institute
of Medicine 2005). There are two possible explanations for this. Firstly, parents
choosing to have fewer children are also less likely to discriminate against girls.
Secondly, girls may have more siblings than boys and face greater resource constraints
as a consequence. This explanation is more relevant to societies with high
fertility rates and strong son preference. Gender disparities in education, then,
would decrease with falling family size, as girls would no longer be likely to come
from larger families. Jensen (2003) found this to be the case in India, where gender
disparities in education occurred because girls tended to have more siblings
than boys and children in larger families often had less schooling.
But caution should be used when interpreting results from many of these
analyses. While these studies found family size to be significantly associated with
schooling, the estimated effects were often relatively small compared to other
factors (see literature review by Kelley 1996 and Lloyd 1994). A recent Brazilian
study, for example, found that declining family size was one of the factors
contributing to the rising school enrolment rates in the 1990s. The number of
siblings aged 0–6 had negative impacts on the child’s school enrolment, with a
slightly more negative impact on girls over boys. There was also a negative effect
of siblings aged 7–17, though this effect was much smaller (Lam and Marteleto
2002). But this impact, while significant, had less influence on enrolment rates
than did parental schooling, which accounted for a substantial proportion of
the increase in rates. Furthermore, many investigations also found that the relationships
between family size and schooling were mediated by other contextual
factors including level of economic development, government expenditure on
education, phase of the demographic transition and family structure.
Level of economic development
Some level of economic development is required for family size to have an impact
on schooling. If a community is without a school, then clearly family size will
have no effect on children’s educational attainment. Similarly, if parents perceive
schools to be of poor quality, unsafe or located far from the home, they are likely
to question the benefit of sending children to school, no matter the size of their
family. Evidence of the importance of economic development on the relationship
between family size and schooling has been found in some studies where larger