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3 results

  • 1 - Understanding the Lives of Left-Behind Children in Rural China

  • Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Children of China's Great Migration
    Published online:
    06 August 2020
    Print publication:
    20 August 2020, pp 1-38

  • Summary

    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.

The Children of China's Great Migration
  • Rachel Murphy
  • Published online:
    06 August 2020
    Print publication:
    20 August 2020
  • In China in 2018 over 200 million rural migrants worked away from their home villages, fuelling the country's rapid economic boom. In the 2010s over sixty-one million rural children had at least one parent who had migrated without them, while nearly half had been left behind by both parents. Rachel Murphy draws on her longitudinal fieldwork in two landlocked provinces to explore the experiences of these left-behind children and to examine the impact of this great migration on childhood in China and on family relationships. Using children's voices, she provides a multi-faceted insight into experiences of parental migration, study pressures, poverty, institutional discrimination, patrilineal family culture, and reconfigured gendered and intergenerational relationships.

  • The alienation of affection toward parents and influential factors in Chinese left-behind children

  • Q. Dai, G. Yang, C. Hu, L. Wang, K. Liu, Y. Guang, R. Zhang, S. Xu, B. Liu, Y. Yang, Z. Feng
  • Journal:
    European Psychiatry / Volume 39 / January 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 March 2020, pp. 114-122
  • Objective

    Although alienation toward parents is important for children (for current mental health status or later interpersonal relationships in adulthood), it is undervalued and even lacks a standardized tool of assessment. Moreover, the large number of left-behind children in China is a cause of public concern. However, their experienced alienation toward their parents remains unclear, which may be important for early detection or intervention for behavioral problems in this population. Hence, the current study aimed to develop an alienation inventory for children and then use it to investigate the experienced alienation toward parents in Chinese left-behind children.

    Methods

    Two studies were carried out. Study 1 was designed to develop a standard inventory of alienation toward parents (IAP). In study 2, 8361 children and adolescents (6704 of them were left-behind status) of the Chongqing area, aged between 8 and 19 years old, were recruited for investigation. All participants were surveyed with a standard sociodemographic questionnaire, children's cognitive style questionnaire, children's depression inventory, adolescent self-rating life events checklist, and newly built IAP in study 1.

    Results

    In study 1, we developed a two-component (communication and emotional distance) and 18-item (9 items for maternal or paternal form, respectively) IAP questionnaire. In study 2, exploratory factor analysis indicated an expected two-factor structure of IAP, which was confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients showed a good reliability (0.887 and 0.821 for maternal and paternal form, respectively). Children with absent mother experienced the highest alienation toward parents. Boys as well as children aged 8–10 years old experienced higher alienation toward parents. Poor communication with parents (sparse or no connection), level of left-behind condition (parents divorced, been far away from parents), and psychosocial vulnerability (stressful life events, negative cognitive style) were risk factors of alienation toward parents.

    Conclusions

    The current study develops a two-factor (communication and emotional distance) IAP, which offers a reliable tool to assess experienced alienation of affection toward parents in children aged between 8 and 19 years old. Our result is the first investigation of experienced alienation and potential influential factors in Chinese left-behind children. The findings that children with absent mother experience higher alienation toward parents, as well as three recognized risk factors for alienation of affection toward parents (poor communication with absent parents, worse left-behind condition, and psychosocial vulnerability), give valuable guidance for parents who intend to leave or who are already leaving as well as for government policymaking.