Abstract
Purpose: With the rapidly developing economy in China, there are more than 50 million left-behind children (LBC) in rural China, whose social adaptation has become a public concern. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the effect of community-based family workshop intervention on social adaptation among rural LBC in China.Methods: A cluster randomized trial was conducted with 104 LBC, in which 66 LBC-caregivers dyads received guidance from community-based family workshop for 6 months, while the controls (LBC n = 38) received routinely parenting guidance. Social adaptation of the children was assessed by the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) at the beginning and the end of the intervention.Findings: Compared with controls, results showed remarkable improvement on emotional symptoms (P = 0.050), peer problems (P = 0.050), and total difficulties score (TDS, P = 0.040) in the intervention group, especially those aged 3–6 years. Moreover, SDQ score of TDS (P = 0.039), peer problems (P = 0.013), and hyperactivity–inattention (P = 0.023) decreased after intervention in boys aged 3–6 years, while emotional symptoms (P = 0.048) in girls. Finally, improvement on peer problems (P = 0.005) was observed in participants with high TDS.Conclusions: The findings suggest that community-based family workshop intervention can improve social adaptation of rural LBC. Moreover, this effect was different in boys and girls and also affected by age and baseline total difficulties. The results indicated that community-based family workshop intervention can be implemented in rural China to improve mental and behavioral health among LBC in the future.
Highlights
China has become one of the largest economies since the reform and opening-up policy started in 1978 [1]
A community-based family workshop intervention underpinned by cognitive behavioral theory [26, 29] was adopted in the current study, we aimed to assess the effectiveness of the intervention on improving the social adaptation among leftbehind children (LBC) aged 3 to 9 years in rural Guangdong province, where there is the largest number of rural LBC in South China [5]
FW, family workshop; SDQ, Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire. aData were assessed by χ 2 test for categorical variables. bAssessed by the unpaired Student t-test
Summary
China has become one of the largest economies since the reform and opening-up policy started in 1978 [1]. Along with the unceasingly thorough development of this policy and the accelerating process of urbanization in China, millions of rural surplus labors have transferred to urban areas for employments and opportunities in the last three decades. To LBC, parental absence may result in a lack of parental guidance, face-to-face communication, emotion care or support, supervision, and low frequency of interactions [8], which is associated with poorer child well-being, including mental health problems [9, 10], behavioral problems [2, 11, 12], and interpersonal relationship problems [13], which could increase the difficulty for them to adapt to the society [14, 15]
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