Differentiated childhoods: impacts of rural labor migration on left-behind children in China

Abstract

This article draws on data from research that includes 400 children who lived separately from their migrant parents in 10 rural communities in China, to explore the deep impacts of rural parents' migration on the care-giving and nurturing of children left behind. It shows that parent migration has brought about multiple impacts, mostly negative, on the lives of children, such as increased workloads, little study tutoring and supervision, and above all the unmet needs of parental affection. Children's basic daily care and personal safety could become problematic since surrogate caregivers, mostly elderly, are usually exhausted with livelihood maintenance. With illumination on the family dysfunction in children's development due to migration-induced family separation, this article highlights the social cost to rural families of parental migration. Urbanization in developing countries is obtained at the expense of rural migrants and their families, especially children left behind. Further attention is required to improve left-behind children's well being within split family structures and interregional migration.

Keywords:

• rural-urban migration
• split family
• left-behind children

Notes

¹1 yuan = 0.147 US dollars.

²The data can be found from the news released by Chinese Xinhua News Agency on 26 May 2009, see http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/2009-05/26/content_11440077.htm [Accessed 18 October 2009].

³In the actual survey process, most pre-school children were considered too young to discuss and express their ideas. Therefore children in the age cohort zero to five were excluded from the questionnaire survey. As compensation, researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with some guardians of those children to get a whole understanding of left-behind children.

⁴United families consist of parents, two or more children, and the children's spouses, with or without grandchildren. They can also refer to families in which two or more brothers or sisters live together with their spouses and children.

⁵Trunk families consist of parents, one of their children and the child's spouse, with or without grandchildren.

⁶Refers to the Chinese New Year.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ye Jingzhong

This research was made possible by the support of China Agricultural University ‘985’ program and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-06-0118) (China). We would like to thank the many enthusiastic young researchers who participated in the collection of data. They are Wu Huifang, He Congzhi, Na Kunpeng, Zhang Keyun, Meng Xiangdan, Wang Yi, Tian Kun, and Liang Zhenhua. We would also like to thank all those who have so willingly cooperated with the field research. They include the children, guardians, school teachers, doctors, shop owners, community managers, and leaders of the villages, townships, and the counties involved in the research. We wish to express our admiration to all those children whose parents migrate to make a living. They work industriously in a comparatively harsh situation, fighting against numerous difficulties in life and studying enthusiastically with their family members, school teachers, and partners, and largely without parental guidance. We thank Prof. Norman Long and Ann Long for their great support for the academic capacity building of the research team. We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and advice. We thank Prof. Tony Fuller for helping improve the English language of the paper.