Chapter 8 reflects on findings from the preceding chapters, concluding that parental migration profoundly changed children’s relationships with the adults in their families. The children were socialised to see their parents’ migration as generating an intergenerational debt for them to repay through study. Simultaneously, children’s perceptions of their families’ care for them were influenced by (1) a future-oriented striving ethos that valorised youth and cities over elders and rurality, and (2) social constructions of motherhood and fatherhood that shaped ideas about the kinds of care and investment necessary to prepare children for decent urban futures. In drawing on the cultural repertoires that people took for granted, striving struck at the heart of the rural family such that pathways to ‘recognition’ within and beyond the family cohered: failure at school or in the labour market was failure as a child, parent, or spouse. This chapter questions the inevitability of ceaseless multi-local family striving. Children, with their natural emphasis on reciprocity highlight the basic human need for social protection, intimacy, interdependence, affective wellbeing and shared time. China’s-policy makers see further urbanisation as the answer to the problem of left-behind children. But can their development plans ever heed a child-inspired ethic of care?

In the 2010s rising aspirations for children’s education reinforced gendered ideas about the best way for rural families to configure themselves. In villages with few off-farm earning opportunities, people saw ‘mother home and father out’ to be optimal for investing in the next generation. But actually-existing versions of this family configuration were stratified. Specifically, families where a father worked overseas or where a migrant mother had returned to peidu (accompany studies) in the county seat gave children greater investments of parental money and time. At the other end of the spectrum, though, were children whose mothers had to stay at home - because of the lack of alternative childcare and their own unsuitability for urban labour markets - while their fathers remitted little. Although people thought that a mother’s at-home care would ensure that the migrant father’s toil was not in vain, the mothers did not tutor the children. Instead, the children benefited from their mothers’ provision of comfort and routine, which helped them to concentrate on their studies. Meanwhile, children saw fathers who provided for them materially as committed to them. But fathers still needed to interact warmly with their children for there to be intimacy in the relationship.

Located in Anhui and Jiangxi provinces, the fieldwork counties of Eastern County, Western County, Tranquil County and Jade County shared many characteristics. These included: a devalued ‘rural’ status; a prevalence of low-quality and low-paying local off-farm jobs; histories of economic and educational deprivation manifest in the grandparents’ and parents’ emplaced biographies; and a patriarchal family culture. In the 2010s these counties also had high rates of labour migration with over half of rural children affected by the migration of at least one parent. At the same time, the four fieldwork sites had distinctive features that impacted on the children’s lives. Specifically, the counties each had their own linkages to certain ‘outside’ places and economic sectors that intersected with other aspects of local geographic context such as physical location, the local school regime characteristics – including whether there were school boarding facilities, school lunches and private schools – and customary gender relations and divisions of labour. These factors affected the immediate setting within which families deliberated who should and could migrate and who should and could deliver childcare, which in turn influenced the children’s experiences of daily care and routines in and around school, and their expectations of parental support for their education.

Chapter 6 discusses children’s relationships with their parents when a mother had migrated while a father stayed at home. This configuration was rare because it so contravened local gender norms it usually signalled inherent family vulnerabilities, typically economic hardship and a father’s physical impairment or else marital discord. In these ‘weak’ families, academically gifted children held out some hope to their parents that with support from the mother’s remittances, the family could strengthen over time. But in families where parents’ relationships were discordant, migrant mothers could be side-lined, while the parents’ divorce or a father’s death could trigger a migrant mother’s complete exit from the striving team. Men whose wives had migrated alone were at gravest risk of negative gender assessment if they earned little. They therefore tried to shore up their masculine worth by entrusting the ‘women’s work’ of childcare to the children’s grandmothers while stressing their commitments outside the home. But intimacy could still develop between the left-behind fathers and children. The family circumstances and the academic aptitude of the children of lone-migrant mothers differed but these children all had to contend with striving pressures and with managing relationships in families perceived by others to be social oddities.

Chapter 3 explores how study and educational aspirations underpinned families’ migration projects. In daily life, the children were subjected to family members’ and school’s efforts to encourage them to accept the logic of parent-child striving teams. Study provided the children with a stake in their family’s migration project, a way for them to honour their parents’ sacrifice, a way for them to win their migrant parents’ recognition, a distraction from missing their parents, and a route to securing a better future than the lowly lives endured by their migrant worker parents. Children of primary school age were the most able to accept that their migrant parents’ sacrifice would be worthwhile if they studied hard, because at this stage their academic promise had yet to manifest itself. By contrast, some teenagers’ feelings about the work-study team’s promises generated inner conflict as it became apparent that they were unlikely to pass milestone exams. Some teenagers felt that they were ‘useless’ because of their low grades. Crucially, though, a few teenagers who had access to viable vocational training options felt more positive about their left behind pasts and about their futures than did low academic performers without such options.

Chapter 1 explains the institutional background to the phenomenon of ‘left-behind’ children in rural China, how these children are represented in the media and scholarly literature, and my unique approach to exploring their lives. Firstly, I focus on the influence of rural-urban migration on family relationships rather than on quantifying the impacts of parents’ migration on different dimensions of the children’s wellbeing, as many previous studies have done. Secondly, I see parental migration as oriented towards educational investment, thereby identifying ‘study’ as central to how the children interpret their parents’ migration and their own obligations to their families. This approach extends extant analyses of children’s experiences of family ‘cultural capital’ accumulation strategies from families where parents and children co-reside to families where parental migration is pivotal to the child raising strategy. Thirdly, I argue that left-behind children are actors in spatially dispersed or multi-local parent-child striving teams rather than the passive recipients of adults’ decisions and migration’s various impacts. I thereby prioritise the children’s perspectives rather than adults’ viewpoints, exploring variation among the children by their gender, age, and academic performance, and by their family’s gendered and generational configurations and class, situated within a wider cultural, institutional and economic context.

Chapter 4 explores the distribution of resources and chores to children by their gender and their perceptions of their family’s distributional practices when their parents had migrated. Chiefly, parents felt obligated to provide sons with money for education and housing, but they only felt obligated to support their daughters’ education.Children realised that their gender impacted on what their parents aimed to provide for them. At the same time, many children perceived inequality in the adults’ everyday treatment of them vis-à-vis their opposite-gender sibling, for instance, in the distribution of food and treats, access to the television remote control, and household chores. Gender inequalities were sometimes also discerned by children in their parents’ decisions about which sibling stayed behind in the countryside and which sibling migrated with the parents. Nevertheless, gender equality in child-raising practices were also evident, including in investment in children’s education and even in the amount of pocket money boys and girls received, as well as in the children’s receipt of gifts from migrant parents. But even as left-behind children benefited from wider processes favouring gender equality, the effects unfolded unevenly across localities, families, and individuals such that boys’ and girls’ experiences of being left-behind varied.