The Consequences Of Rural-To-Urban Migration On Children’s Well-Being In China

In recent years, China has experienced a massive rural-urban labor migration, which emerge a considerable number of left behind and migrant children. Labor mobility have changed the family structure and living environment of children, which will have some impact on their welfare. In order to explore the size and the mechanism of child welfare affected by the migration of parents, we use Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data of 2010 and 2012 to analysis rural left behind and urban migrant children’s health condition, education performance and mental health respectively.On the one hand, we compare left behind children and rural children living with both parents, according to parents flow pattern, we divided children into two groups:children left behind with mother when father goes out to work; and children left behind with father or sent to live with others when mother or both parents goes out to work. By construction of balanced panel data and using difference-in-difference (DID) method to give causal effects of parents migration to children’s welfare, we have some conclusions:First, parents migration make left behind children’s weight gain slows 2-3 pounds, mother or both parents goes out will reduce children’s self-rated health condition. Second, children left behind with mother will have a decreasing in Chinese grade, mother or both parents migration has little effect on children’s education performance. Third, in the eight system depression scores, children with mother of both parents migration will increase 0.4 scores in depression scores. On the other hand, in order to explore if migrant children’s welfare increasing with floating, we use cross-sectional data in 2012 and Ordinary least squares method (OLS) to compare welfare of migrant children with urban local children, we have some conclusions:First, rural children are worse than urban children in terms of the physical health condition, Rural migrant children is lower than normal children 2.9 pounds,5 pounds lower than urban children. Second, children’s educational performance did not improve with the floating, in particular, migrant children have no difference with rural children in math grade and delayed word memory, but compare with urban children, migrant children are worse than urban children and their delayed word memory scores also lower than urban children in 0.41 points. In the children’s classes and Grades rank, as well as standardized test scores aspect, migrant children and children in general lower than urban and rural children. Third, for mental health, urban and rural children are not significantly different, migrant children have no psychological problems bring about by the floating.Left behind and Migrant children are relatively have poor level of benefits, in order to handle this problem, I have some policy suggestion: In childhood, parents and children are not separated as much as possible, if had to go out, they should strengthened frequency of communication with children; Strengthening investment in rural health and education infrastructure building; In the long run, we should be gradually reduced and eliminate urban-rural dual structure institutional isolation.