What does ‘left behind’ mean to children living in migratory regions in rural China?

Abstract

This article explores how in China in the early to mid-2010s non-migrant children in households with and without migrants interpreted the situation of children being left behind because of parental migration. These children lived in rural regions in China’s eastern interior where parental migration had become a ‘new normal’ and where a good future was one that involved escaping rurality and progressing to a stable urban job through education. Based on my interviews with forty-four left behind children of two migrant parents and twenty-nine children who lived with both their parents, this article demonstrates that the children’s deep feelings about their own family’s circumstances impacted on their perceptions about the situation of children being ‘left behind’. The children’s views reveal implications of parental migration that are more complex than neat delineations of trade-offs between costs (reduced parental care) and benefits (increased income) suggest. The discussion further contributes to bridging conceptual dichotomies between migrants and non-migrants and between left-behinds and other stayers.