Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
One-child policy in place: Community context, gender, and child nutrition in China
Authors: Yingyi Lin Emily Smith-Greenaway Laura Ferguson
Presenting Author: Yingyi Lin*
China’s one-child policy (1979-2015) is known to have benefited the health of some, but not all children. Indeed, the one-child policy has also created health disadvantages for some children, either through discrimination or over-investment. The literature to date has nearly exclusively focused on the implications of the policy for children’s own family composition, and the corresponding impact of having no siblings. However, there exists substantial heterogeneity in the extent of policy-uptake across places in China—a reality that is rarely acknowledged in research, yet may further influence investment in, and ultimately the physical health of, children. Thus, in this paper, we work to put the one-child policy into “place” using nine waves of China Health and Nutrition Surveys (1991-2015) to analyze the standardized body mass index (BMI) of 7,481 children under 19 years living in 310 local communities. We find that the spatial variation in the community prevalence of singleton boys versus singleton respectively, and that these varied family contexts correspond with distinct child health patterns. Most children living among a higher prevalence of singleton boys have a lower risk of being overweight; however, girls who have male siblings experience the lowest BMI. Alternatively, children living around a higher prevalence of singleton girls corresponds with over-investment in all children, regardless of their own family composition, leading to their higher risk of being overweight. This paper demonstrates that the one-child policy not only changed families themselves but also the landscape of family contexts. Leveraging the diversity by which the one-child policy was experienced and situating children’s health experiences in their broader social contexts, the findings emphasize the need to adopt a layered lens, a more localized perspective, when studying the one-child policy to fully identify the various unintended consequences it can have for children’s health.