The Children Left Behind

Children in rural China, left in the care of relatives by their migrant-worker parents.

“Like millions of Chinese children, 16-year-old Song Yuedong sees his parents just once a year,” Agence France-Presse reported.

As China’s army of migrant workers toil to build their nation’s future, children like Song live with relatives, often knowing their parents only as voices on the end of a phone.

Although not new, the problem of liushou ertong (or children left behind) appears to be getting worse: in 2000, A.F.P. reported, there were 23 million liushou ertong; the most recent figures indicate that the total is now 58 million (although only half of these are missing both parents). As might be expected, psychological and emotional problems are common among “left behind” children. Experts told A.F.P. that an absence of parental care leaves many children “vulnerable to violence including rape.”

Now, according to A.F.P., authorities in the eastern Chinese province ofAnhui “have taken steps to defuse what experts say is a social time bomb” by introducing measures designed to improve the prospects of liushou ertong. These measures include appointing school professors as “interim family heads,” and offering training to grandparents so that they can help their grandchildren with homework.

Song Yuedong’s school was the first in Anhui to introduce the scheme. Its headmaster told A.F.P.:

Before we had a lot of problems with the students. … But since we put the program in place [2004], the grades of ‘liushou ertong’ have gone up and the problems that we had with them have gone down.

(A recent report by Channel News Asia suggested that children who accompanied their migrant-worker parents were not necessarily better off: “In Beijing, there is an estimated 240,000 children whose parents are migrant workers. Many are unable to attend school, mostly because their families cannot afford it.”)