China’s rapid development and urbanization have induced large numbers of rural residents to migrate from their homes to urban areas in search of better job opportunities. Parents typically leave their children behind with a caregiver, creating a new, potentially vulnerable subpopulation of left-behind children in rural areas.

A growing number of policies and nongovernmental organization efforts target these children.

Prof. ZHANG Linxiu from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and her colleagues investigated 141,000 children in ten provinces conducted between 2009 and 2013, to examine whether left-behind children are really the most vulnerable.

Researchers analyzed nine indicators of health, nutrition, and education. They found that for all nine indicators, left-behind children performed as well as or better than children living with both parents. However, both groups of children performed poorly on most of these indicators.

Based on these findings, they recommend that special programs designed to improve health, nutrition, and education among left-behind children be expanded to cover all children in rural China.

The related results have been published in the journal of Health Affairs (Zhou, Chengchao, Sean Sylvia, Linxiu Zhang, Renfu Luo, Hongmei Yi, Chengfang Liu, Yaojiang Shi, Prashant Loyalka, James Chu, Alexis Medina and Scott Rozelle. 2015.China's Left-Behind Children: Impact of Parental Migration on Health, Nutrition, And Educational Outcomes. Health Affairs, 34, no.11 (2015):1964-1971. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0150).