Identity crisis among rural-to-urban migrant children in China: a proposal for school and government interventions

ABSTRACT

As millions of school-aged migrant children are being deprived of educational resources, social identity crisis has developed throughout schooling and become a prominent issue in contemporary China. The purpose of this article is to pull together existing empirical evidence with direct bearing on migrant children’s acculturation experiences and place these studies within a framework of compulsory education policies that can facilitate a better understanding of the insufficiency of current policies in addressing the migrant identity crisis. To alleviate the crisis, we inform policy practice by proposing three intervention approaches, directly influencing migrant children’s access to crisis counselling, validation, and support.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant children
• social identity
• compulsory education
• school social work
• government intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Migrant children who come from wealthy families can afford expensive private school education; however, the population of migrant children discussed in this paper refers to migrant children who come from low-SES families.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qianfeng Lin

Qianfeng Lin graduated from Columbia University School of Social Work with a Master of Science in Social Work degree. He studies the impacts of education inequality, internal migration and immigration, multidimensional poverty, and social welfare policies. He is a research fellow at the Columbia China Center for Social Policy since 2017. He also works at a consultant at the Community Counseling & Mediation.

Mengluo Ren

Mengluo Ren is a PhD student at Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management. She graduated from Columbia University and received a Master of Science in Social Work degree. Mengluo's research interests include social inequality and sustainable development.

Mengdi Yang

Mengdi Yang is a graduate student at Columbia University School of Social Work concentrating at Social Policy of International Social Welfare. She earned her bachelor's degree in communication studies from University of California, Los Angeles, studying impacts of multicultural communication on social media and political communication related to social policy. Currently, She studies rural-urban migrant children's education in China, Asian American immigrants, international social welfare and poverty. She is a policy intern at the United Nations Development Program.