Zhou Chengchao, Sylvia Sean, Zhang Linxiu, Luo Renfu, Yi Hongmei, Liu Chengfang, Shi Yaojiang, Loyalka Prashant, Chu James, Medina Alexis, Rozelle Scott
Chengchao Zhou is an associate professor of public health at the School of Public Health, Shandong University, in China.
Sean Sylvia is an assistant professor of economics at the School of Economics, Renmin University of China, in Beijing.
Health Aff (Millwood). 2015 Nov;34(11):1964-71. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0150.
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. The primary objective of this study was to examine whether left-behind children are really the most vulnerable and in need of special programs. Pulling data from a comprehensive data set covering 141,000 children in ten provinces (from twenty-seven surveys conducted between 2009 and 2013), we analyzed nine indicators of health, nutrition, and education. We 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, we recommend that special programs designed to improve health, nutrition, and education among left-behind children be expanded to cover all children in rural China.
中国的快速发展和城市化进程促使大量农村居民背井离乡前往城市地区寻找更好的工作机会。父母通常会把孩子留给照顾者，由此在农村地区形成了一个新的、可能易受伤害的留守儿童亚群体。越来越多的政策以及非政府组织致力于帮助这些孩子。本研究的主要目的是考察留守儿童是否真的是最脆弱且最需要特殊项目帮扶的群体。我们从一个涵盖十个省份14万名儿童的综合数据集中提取数据（这些数据来自2009年至2013年间开展的27项调查），分析了健康、营养和教育方面的九项指标。我们发现，在所有九项指标上，留守儿童的表现与父母双全的孩子相当，甚至更好。然而，两组儿童在大多数这些指标上的表现都不佳。基于这些发现，我们建议，旨在改善留守儿童健康、营养和教育状况的特殊项目应扩大覆盖范围，惠及中国农村的所有儿童。
