The Impact Of Rural Parents’ Migration On Left-behind Children’s Educational Performance And Aspirations

Under the background of modernization and urbanization, surplus labor force inrural area migrant to cities on a large scale which led the formation of rural migrantworkers, at the same time, due to the dual household register system andsocioeconomic structure, another group--the left-behind children--was occurred.Direct and indirect signs show the existence of the left-behind children problem,including the negative impact of rural parents’ migration on left-behind children’seducation, mentality, growth and so on. According to the theory of the new economicsof labor migration, people decide to migrate or not based on the present value of labornet income, that is income deduce the cost. There are a lot of cost for rural migrants,like transport cost, living cost etc, we argue that the impact on their left-behindchildren’s educational performance and aspirations can be one of the cost.Our research proved the existence of such cost. we used the survey data--Chinese Family Panel Studies(2010)—by China Social Science Research Center inPeking University, used ordered probit model and probit model to make a empiricalstudy on the impact of rural parents’ migration on left-behind children’s education,including educational performance and aspirations. Our studies show that there is nonegative impact of rural parents’ migration on left-behind children’s educationalperformance; the labor income can improve the children’s educational performance,especially for junior school students. However, there is negative impact on left-behindchildren’s educational aspirations, especially the left-behind boys; they are moreunwilling to go to college. And we also discovered that the higher the parents’ degreeof education is, the better the children’s educational performance will be.Based on our studies, we suggested that parents should take the impact on theirleft-behind children’s educational aspirations as one of their migration cost whenmaking the migration decision. In order to reduce the negtive impact, we suggested asfollow to improve the situation. Firstly, for the migration families, parents, especiallythe mothers should not leave the children behind unless they are old enough to takecare of themselves. Parents should spend more time on educating the left-behindboys’ personality development, more time on affective communication with the girlsto reduce their mental pressure. Secondly, schools should improve the education for left-behind children, the public should give more cares and attention to the left-behindchildren. Finally, the socielty phase out the dual structure of urban and rural areas,resolve the education problems of the children who migrant with their parents. Thesewould help to deduce the costs of rural parents migration, then facilitate themigrantion of rural labor force in China.