Labor Migration, Family Separation and the Long-term Outcomes

Abstract

The rising mobility of labor across the world has led to a rising phenomenon of so-called ‘left-behind children.” In many settings, this phenomenon involves transnational families, but in China, great numbers of children are left behind in rural areas as parents move to cities for work. According to China’s latest population census in 2010, there were approximately 61 million left-behind children in China in 2010, which accounted for 21.88% of its total child population (Zhou, Murphy, & Tao, 2014) and almost equaled the total number of children in United States in the same year.