["Review of Development Economics, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe frequency of natural disasters has surged globally in recent years. However, the existing literature paid limited attention to the role of government and individual disaster response strategies on shaping human capital outcomes in disaster‐affected populations. This paper uses the 1998 nationwide floods in China as a quasi‐natural experiment to estimate the loss of educational opportunities for rural children exposed to natural disasters. By matching county‐level precipitation anomaly data with the 2010 census data, the difference‐in‐difference analysis showed that individuals in early life stages (ages 7–15) in rural areas exposed to stronger floods experienced a significant reduction in educational opportunities. This negative impact of the 1998 China floods on educational opportunities was more pronounced among females and impeded intergenerational mobility in rural areas. The mechanism behind this finding is twofold. First, the impact of flooding increased the burden on rural households and reduced their investment in their children's education, with this deprivation effect being particularly pronounced in areas more dependent on the primary sector. Second, due to early experiences of flooding, there is an increased likelihood of parents migrating to cities for work. While the potential increase in income may have positive effects, the negative impact of leaving children behind tends to dominate. However, post‐disaster investment in education and infrastructures from the government helped mitigate the long‐term negative impacts of the floods to some extent. This paper re‐emphasizes the negative impacts of natural disasters on human capital accumulation, elucidating the different response behaviors of the government and farm households, contributing to understanding the impact of different actors' responses to natural disasters on the long‐term human capital accumulation of the offspring, providing a reference for post‐disaster relief efforts in countries or regions in transition.\n"]