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Education and Teenager Development: 

Interpretation of Social Capital, Cultural 

Capital, and Shadow Education

Jiali Li,
1
 Ruizhu He

2
 

 
1. School of Education, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200030, 

China 

2. Faculty of Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 

China

This paper utilizes data from the China Education Panel Survey 2013-
2015 to examine the effects of family time and money inputs in education 
on adolescent academic performance from the perspectives of home 
social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education. Home time input 
in education is more vital to teenager academic progress than money 
input. Domestic social capital and cultural capital as well as weekend 
shadow education positively impact child academic results. Home-based 
parental participation as a key component of domestic social capital has 
the most significant influence on teenager academic improvement, while 
weekend supplementary tutoring generates the weakest effect; workday 
extracurricular tutoring even negatively affects student academic 
achievement. School-based parental involvement differs among families 
of different classes, with a significant negative effect on academic results 
of teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds. Due to the absence of 
heterogeneity effects of home time input in education on academic 
progress of students from various social backgrounds, parental time 
investment should be taken as the most effective means to improve 
academic performance of adolescents from underprivileged classes. 

Best Evidence in Chinese Education 2022; 11(1):1455-1460. 
Doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab002. 

How to Cite: Li, J., & He, R. (2022). Family time and money inputs in education and 
teenager development: Interpretation of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow 
education. Best Evidence in Chinese Education, 11(1):1455-1460. 



Li & He. Family Time and Money Inputs in Education and Teenager Development. 

BECE, Vol.11, No.1, 2022 1456 

Keywords: Family Educational Inputs, Social Capital, Cultural Capital, Shadow Education 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

About the Author: Jiali Li, School of Education, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200030, China 

Correspondence to: Ruizhu He, Faculty of Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. 
E-mail: estherho@cuhk.edu.hk 
Conflict of Interests: None. 
 

© 2022 Insights Publisher. All rights reserved. 

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License 

(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of 

the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the Insights Publisher. 

mailto:estherho@cuhk.edu.hk
http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


Li & He. Family Time and Money Inputs in Education and Teenager Development. 

BECE, Vol.11, No. 1, 2022 1457 

Previous studies on family educational investment mostly focus on one single dimen-

sion such as parental participation, cultural capital, or shadow education. Few of them 

integrate home time and money inputs in education in one discussion, despite that the 

two are generally concurrent. The differences in home time and money investment in 

child education among families of different classes as well as the impact of the inputs 

on teenagers and its power are worth exploration. Based on data from the China Educa-

tion Panel Survey 2013-2015, we discuss the social stratification of home educational 

investment and the effects of differential family inputs on adolescent development. To 

be specific, this paper addresses the following topics: 1) the current state of time and 

money inputs in education by families of different social status and disparities in social 

capital, cultural capital, and access to shadow education among differentiated family 

backgrounds (such as the family economic status, parental education level, parents’ pro-

fessional status); 2) the impact of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education 

on teenager academic performance and its power; 3) the impact of time and money in-

vestment in education by families of different social strata on child academic achieve-

ment and heterogeneity effects of social capital, cultural capital and extracurricular tu-

toring on the development of students with different family backgrounds. 

Research Data and Variables 

This study uses data from CEPS 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 to investigate the impact of 

home time and money inputs in education on teenager academic achievement. CEPS 

2013-2014 randomly selected 438 classes (roughly 20,000 students) from 112 schools 

in 28 county-level administrative regions in China. In the academic year of 2014-2015, 

it succeeded in following up 9449 students who were the 7th graders in 2013-2014.  

Their average score of Mathematics, Chinese, and English is treated as the dependent 

variable. Core explanatory variables include social capital, cultural capital, and shadow 

education. Social capital consists of domestic activities such as parental company, par-

ent-child communication, parental supervision and external events like school-parent 

communication, parents’ meetings, inter-parent interactions. Cultural capital includes 

parents’ time input in reading (reading habit) and money input (book collection). Shad-

ow education refers to both Monday-Friday and weekend extracurricular tutoring. Indi-

vidual attributes, family backgrounds, and school features are used as control variables. 

Individual attributes include gender, hukou, the only child of the family or not, early 

ability, parental and self-education expectations, and parents’ expectations of child aca-

demic performance; Family backgrounds refer to home economic status, parents’ high-

est education level and occupational position; School features cover the regional level 

of the school location, school type, and school ranking. 

Methodology 

This study adopts descriptive statistical methods such as chi-square test and F test to 

analyze the status quo of and differences in social capital, cultural capital, and shadow 

education among families with different backgrounds. Moreover, ordinary OLS regres-

sion is used to investigate the effect of different family educational inputs such as pa-

rental participation, cultural capital and shadow education on adolescent academic per-

formance, and Shapley decomposition is used to analyze the influence of family money 



Li & He. Family Time and Money Inputs in Education and Teenager Development. 

BECE, Vol.11, No. 1, 2022 1458 

and time investment in education on the gap in adolescent academic performance. Fur-

thermore, the interaction terms of parameters such as family backgrounds (family eco-

nomic status, parents’ occupational position and education level), social capital, cultural 

capital and shadow education are incorporated into the analysis to ascertain the hetero-

geneity of impact of home time and money investment in education on the academic 

achievement of adolescents from different social classes.  

Research Results 

Descriptive Statistics 

The average academic results of children from socioeconomically advantaged families 

(with high economic status and high parental education level and occupational position) 

are significantly superior to those of children from disadvantaged families (with impov-

erished or manual-worker parents of education background below senior secondary lev-

el); the former score 10 points higher than the latter in Mathematics, Chinese, and Eng-

lish tests on average. There are substantial differences in time and money inputs in edu-

cation among families of different backgrounds. Socioeconomically advantaged Fami-

lies from the middle and above classes have significantly higher economic and time 

investment in education than their disadvantaged counterparts. Nonetheless, there is no 

remarkable difference in parental company between them. 

The Differentiated Effects of Home Educational Inputs 

on Adolescent Academic Performance 

Extracurricular tutoring on workdays (from Monday to Friday) imposes a significant 

negative effect on adolescent academic results, while that on weekends has significant 

positive impact. Cultural capital such as the family book collection and parental reading 

habit affects adolescent academic achievement positively. Domestic social capital such 

as parental company and parent-child communication has a significant positive impact 

on adolescent academic performance; the higher the frequency of parental participation, 

the better the child academic performance; parental supervision has a significant nega-

tive influence on adolescent academic results. External social capital such as parents’ 

meeting and inter-parent communication is not correlated with adolescent academic 

performance; the higher the frequency of home-school communication, the lower the 

student academic performance. Differentiation of effects of social capital, cultural capi-

tal, and extracurricular tutoring on adolescent academic achievement by the Shapley 

decomposition method shows that social capital and cultural capital account for average 

score gaps among students (6.94% and 6.10%, respectively) more than extracurricular 

tutoring (2.58%). To be more specific, domestic social capital has a significantly higher 

accountability rate (5.82%) than the external social capital (1.43%); parent-child com-

munication has the greatest impact, with an accountability rate of 3.82%. In terms of 

cultural capital, weekend extracurricular tutoring accounts for average score disparities 

among students (1.86%) more than weekday tutoring (0.38%), but significantly less 

than parent-child communication, book collection size and parental reading habits. 



Li & He. Family Time and Money Inputs in Education and Teenager Development. 

BECE, Vol.11, No. 1, 2022 1459 

Heterogeneity Effects of Family Educational Invest-

ment on Academic Performance of Teenagers with Dif-

ferent Family Backgrounds 

Parental supervision and home-school communication have significant heterogeneity 

effects on academic performance of adolescents from families with different economic 

status; the interaction term between parental supervision and home economic status is 

significantly negative, indicating that the negative impact of parental supervision on 

adolescent academic achievement decreases with lowered family economic status; the 

interaction term between home-school communication and family economic status is 

significantly positive, indicating that the positive effect of home-school communication 

on adolescent academic performance decreases with lowered family economic status. 

Home book collection sizes and parents’ meetings have significant heterogeneity effects 

on academic results of adolescents with parents of different occupational positions, and 

the positive effects of these two variables on adolescent academic results increase with 

lowered parents’ occupational positions. Weekend extracurricular tutoring, book collec-

tion sizes, parents’ meetings, inter-parent communication have significant heterogeneity 

effects on academic performance of adolescents with parents of different education lev-

els; the interaction terms between parents’ education level and weekend extracurricular 

tutoring, the home book collection size, and the parents’ meeting are significantly nega-

tive, while the interaction term between parents’ education level and inter-parent com-

munication is significantly positive, indicating that weekend extracurricular tutoring, 

book collection sizes, parents’ meetings have a greater positive effect on academic 

achievement of teenagers having parents with education background of senior second-

ary level or below, and that inter-parent communication had a greater positive effect on 

academic performance of adolescents with highly educated parents. 

Conclusions and Discussion 

 There exist class differences in home time and money inputs in education. Parents 

of middle-class or above not only spend more money in acquiring off-campus edu-

cational service and resources for their children, but also spare more time to ac-

company their children than those in manual labor force with education back-

grounds of senior secondary level or below and poor incomes. Therefore, home 

time and money inputs in education by the advantaged classes are significantly 

higher than those by the disadvantaged classes. 

 

 Family time input in education is the primary factor affecting child academic per-

formance. Relatively direct time input on children by parents in the form of home 

social capital such as parent-child communication exerts the greatest effect on ado-

lescent academic achievement. There is timing difference in the impact of shadow 

education on student progress. Extracurricular tutoring between Monday and Friday 

fails to improve or even impairs teenager academic performance, while attending 

extracurricular tutoring on weekends can significantly improve adolescent academ-

ic results. 



Li & He. Family Time and Money Inputs in Education and Teenager Development. 

BECE, Vol.11, No. 1, 2022 1460 

 

 Heterogeneity effects of home time investment in education in some specific forms 

are most pronounced on adolescent academic performance. The negative impact of 

parents’ meetings on student academic results lessens with lowered parental educa-

tion levels and occupational positions; there is the possibility that academic results 

of teenager students from working class with education background of senior sec-

ondary level or below are positively correlated with parental attendance of parents’ 

meeting. The positive effect of parent-teacher and inter-parent communication on 

student academic progress increases with the elevation of family economic status 

and parents’ education level. Economic inputs in weekend extracurricular tutoring 

and home book collection have a negative impact on the academic performance of 

adolescents from advantaged families, but a positive impact on the academic 

achievement of those from disadvantaged families. 

 

 

 

 

The Chinese version of this article has been published in China Youth Study, 2019(8):97-105. The 
English version has been authorized for being publication in BECE by the author(s) and the Chi-
nese journal. 

 
李佳丽, 何瑞珠. (2019).家庭教育时间投入,经济投入和青少年发展:社会资本,文化资本和影
子教育阐释. 中国青年研究, 2019(8):97-105. 

 

 

Received: 01 April 2022 
Revised: 18April 2022 

Accepted: 09 May 2022 
 

 

 

 

 


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