The Effects of Siblings Composition on the Children's Intellectual Performance in Indonesia

摘要

Number of children and the perfect time to raise children is one of paramount decisions that a household encounters. This rationale appeared since parents recently realized that the number of children they have, the birth order and/or a certain birth-interval between children does matter in influencing the outcome of children, including the children's intelligence. Although the impacts of family structure on children's outcome in Indonesia have been widely examined; the literatures exploring birth order among siblings, along with the impacts of birth interval on child's wellbeing are so far hardly found. Utilizing the large-scale outgoing longitudinal data, Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) year 2007, this study attempts to find whether birth order and birth spacing affect the older sibling's intelligence at the age of 7-14 years old. The OLS results suggest that birth order adversely affects the child's intellectual performance. However, such effect becomes negligible and insignificant when there is a longer birth gap between children. In addition, those cognitive-endowment-related factors will be gratuitous if there is no cognitive development process at home. From the perspective of family planning program, the findings propose a need for policy design persuading longer inter-pregnancy gap for the sake of intelligence outcome.