When Schooling Changes Family Time

Mexico’s 1993 compulsory-schooling reform changed more than how long some people stayed in school. This chapter follows the reform-induced attainment gain into family life, asking what happened to fertility and child survival when schooling rose. The evidence supports a concrete conclusion for the people whose education the reform changed: family size became smaller and child survival improved. It also requires restraint. The study identifies net effects for compliers, not one separately measured psychological or medical pathway from a classroom to a household.

Fewer children, better survival

The reform study uses instrumental-variable estimates to examine women’s fertility and child survival. The instrument is the schooling variation created by eligibility for the 1993 reform, so the comparison is not simply between women who chose different amounts of education. It follows the same local treatment margin established in the attainment analysis: an additional year of schooling for people whose education rose because the reform reached them.

The average fertility effect is substantial in household terms. One additional year of reform-induced schooling reduced the number of children by about 0.28. It also increased the probability that a woman had no children by 2.17 percentage points. The measures describe different parts of family formation. The first captures a change among women who became mothers; the second captures a shift in the probability of remaining childless. Together they indicate that schooling affected both the size of families and the likelihood of having children at all.

The effect was not uniform. Among Indigenous women, an additional year of schooling was associated with about 0.40 fewer children. In rural areas, the reduction was about 0.33. These are larger changes than the full-sample estimate, which is consistent with the attainment results: the reform generated larger schooling gains where baseline education and access were lower. The pattern also fits the idea that the opportunity cost of leaving school or entering work changes most when schooling had previously been limited, though the study does not isolate that mechanism from others.

Child survival changed in the same broad direction. The child-mortality measure—the share of children ever born who were no longer living—declined significantly across the groups examined. The estimates were relatively modestly heterogeneous compared with the fertility results, meaning that the survival improvement was not confined to one subgroup even though the largest educational gains were concentrated in disadvantaged communities.

This is an important extension of the reform’s meaning. A schooling policy can change a life not only by increasing the chance of employment or the type of job available, but by changing the number of children in a household and the probability that those children survive. These are not interchangeable outcomes. Smaller family size reflects a change in reproductive behaviour; lower child mortality reflects a change in survival among children ever born. Treating both as a single measure of “well-being” would erase the distinction the data make visible.