Abstract
Although long-term separation has made discrepancies between parents’ educational aspirations and children’s own educational expectations among families with left-behind children (LBC), limited researches on the influence of these discrepancies on children’s mental health are carried out at present. Based on China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) conducted in 2018, we selected 875 LBC aged 9~15 as the sample, explored the influence of the direction and degree of these discrepancies on LBC’s depressive symptoms by hierarchical regression, and examined the mediating role of children’s academic self-efficacy and mediation effect pathway with Baron and Kenny method and Bootstrap mediation analysis methods. Results showed that LBC’s mental health was worse when parents’ educational aspirations were higher than their children’s educational expectations, compared to that without discrepancies. The degree of such discrepancies was negatively associated with LBC’s mental health. In the relationship between the direction of discrepancies and LBC’s depressive symptoms, academic self-efficacy played a mediating role partially. In addition, the study indicated that mothers played a significant role in the development of LBC’s mental health. These findings also provided critical evidence for the intervention practice of LBC’s mental health.
Highlights
China’s rapid urbanization has caused large numbers of rural residents migrating to urban areas for work, resulting in the emergence of a potentially vulnerable sub-population, left-behind children (LBC) [1,2]
In China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), participants were conducted by face-to-face interviews aided by computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technology, computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) technology and computer-assisted Web interviewing (CAWI) technology
The study extended the specific dimensions of the differences between parents’ educational aspirations and children’s educational expectations, and expanded the existing studies from the following two aspects: First, from the perspectives of educational aspirations and educational expectations, it emphasized the influence of differences in educational aspirations and educational expectations between different subjects on LBC’s mental health
Summary
China’s rapid urbanization has caused large numbers of rural residents migrating to urban areas for work, resulting in the emergence of a potentially vulnerable sub-population, left-behind children (LBC) [1,2]. LBC refers to children who are under 18 with one or both parents migrating to cities for work for at least 6 months, while children remain rural household [3,4]. They are usually taken care of by one parent, grandparents, siblings, other relatives or friends, etc. A large number of studies have shown that long-term separation from parents would arise multiple detrimental impacts on LBC, for example: prosocial behavior [6], obsessive-compulsive [7], depression [8,9], lower academic performance [10], emotional symptoms [6,11], and peer problems [11].
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