Abstract
Early childhood development intervention has gained considerable achievements in eliminating intergenerational transmission of poverty in rural areas. Paying further attention to rural children’s community inclusion can also promote the sustainable development of the village. However, there is a lack of systematic theoretical constructs on the village inclusion of rural children. In this study, an attempt was made to explore the problem mechanism and solution strategy of community inclusion of rural children using a grounded theory approach of in-depth interviews. Seventeen parents of children in a national-level poverty-stricken county in Inner Mongolia of China were investigated, adopting the strategy of intensity sampling. The results revealed that (1) the content of rural children’s activities demonstrates enhanced participation in the virtual environment and weakened participation in the real community environment. That is, the activities are characterized by more virtualization and individualization. (2) Rural parents and community peers are two major channels for children’s community inclusion, while both the community peer environment and parental community participation show a weakening trend. This may be an important reason for the virtualization and individualization of the children’s psychological development environment. (3) Developmental intervention programs for rural children in poverty-stricken areas should focus on the reconstruction of children’s community peer environment, encourage the community participation of parents, and fully mobilize local-based educational resources.
Highlights
Relying solely on economic growth cannot promote equitable and sustainable development in rural and poverty-stricken areas
As a sociological method, grounded theory has been widely employed in the fields of community education, community engagement, and social work research (Charmaz, 2006; Hastings et al, 2011; Claramita et al, 2019), which proves that grounded theory has good support for studying community inclusion in this study
Rural parents may control the use of electronic media for children entering school age, while there are no clear control standards for children’s mobile phone use
Summary
Relying solely on economic growth cannot promote equitable and sustainable development in rural and poverty-stricken areas. By investing in human development and increasing access to public services can we maximize the revitalization of the countryside and improve social cohesion. Fu et al.’s (2020) qualitative research on the endogenous motivation mechanism of poverty alleviation revealed the psychological mechanism of generations of poverty. Perceptions of Children’s Community Inclusion out that substantial companionship and nurturing are important family social capital for the children of poor families to get rid of poverty. Heckman (2000) suggested that investing in children’s capacity development is a kind of pre-distribution, which is more efficient and fairer than redistribution. The investment with the greatest social return is for disadvantaged children living in a poor family nurturing environment
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