Abstract As the population in China ages, providing care for the elderly in rural China has become an unprecedented challenge. This paper studies how fertility decisions affect the rural elderly, with a specific focus on outcomes for parents with children who are male compared to those whose children are female. This study demonstrates that the educational level of grown children has a positive effect on improving elderly parents’ quality of life. Furthermore, preferential treatment of more talented children is more effective than simply increasing the number of children, which in fact has negative influence on the life quality of the parents. Overall, an improvement in the education level of female children does more to improve parents’ quality of life than that of male children. However, the scale of effect differs at different stages. In early and middle stages of old age, the health and economic conditions of elderly parents improve as the length of the daughter’s education increases. Daughters tend to provide more care to parents than sons. Yet, for later stages, the educational level of sons plays a more significant role in the life quality of the rural elderly.
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