ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1714830
This article is part of the Research TopicEmpowering Rural Women for Resilient Food Systems: Strengthening Rights and Resources for Climate ResilienceView all articles
Empowering Rural Family Networks: Parental Support and Fertility Intentions in China
Provisionally accepted
- Hohai University, Nanjing, China
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Fertility decline in rural China poses growing challenges for demographic sustainability and gender equity. Rural women remain structurally disadvantaged due to disproportionate caregiving burdens, limited access to institutional childcare, and constrained autonomy in reproductive decision-making. Drawing on data from 4,263 individuals of reproductive age in the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study examines how different types of parental support—emotional, caregiving, and financial shape fertility intentions, and further examines the mediating role of psychological well-being. Logistic regression and mediation analyses reveal that emotional and caregiving support from parents significantly enhance fertility intentions by reducing depressive symptoms and improving subjective well-being. In rural-urban migrant families and households in under-resourced areas, caregiving support plays a particularly important compensatory effect. These findings highlight the importance of informal family-based support systems as empowerment mechanisms that strengthen the reproductive agency and social resilience of rural women. The study call for gender-sensitive family policies to address structural inequalities and promote equitable, sustainable rural development.
Keywords: Rural Women, Intergenerational support, Fertility intentions, Subjective well-being, caregiving burden, Rural Development
Received: 28 Sep 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Feng, Tan and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ran Feng, fengran0608@163.com
Yiting Tan, yiting.tan1105@hhu.edu.cn
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