Abstract
Objectives
In China, 61 million children have been left behind in their original rural communities by migrant-labor parents, among whom 60% live apart from their migrant mother. This study examined the associations of mother versus father absence with adolescents’ academic achievement, cognitive ability, and emotional well-being in rural China as well as explored parenting practices (i.e., parental regulation, parent-child communication, parent-child co-activities) as mechanisms to explain the hypothesized different maternal and paternal roles in relation to adolescent development.
Method
Using a recent nationally representative dataset with 7419 adolescents, fixed effects models and propensity score weighting were used to assess the association between parental migration and adolescent development. Multiple regressions with the Sobel tests were employed to explore the mediating role of parenting practices.
Results
The analyses revealed that living in mother-absent households was negatively associated with adolescents’ test scores and depressive symptoms, whereas living in father-absent households was rarely associated with negative outcomes. Results also indicated that the differences between the child development in mother- versus father-absent households were partially explained by disparities in parenting practices.
Conclusions
Our study suggested that parental absence and parenting practices were jointly related to youth development among types of migrant families. Given the massive level of labor migration in China as well as the growth of labor migration in many other developing countries, both scholars and policy makers will want to take note.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbott, D. A., Zheng, M. F., & Meredith, W. H. (1992). An evolving redefinition of the fatherhood role in the People’s Republic of China. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 22(1), 45–54.
Amato, P. R. (2005). The impact of family formation change on the cognitive, social, and emotional well-being of the next generation. The Future of Children, 15(2), 75–96.
Bai, Y., Zhang, L., Liu, C., Shi, Y., Mo, D., & Rozelle, S. (2018). Effect of parental migration on the academic performance of left behind children in North Western China. The Journal of Development Studies, 54(7), 1154–1170.
Bochner, A.P., & Eisenberg, E. (1987). Family process: Systems perspectives. In C. Berger & S. Chaffee (Eds.), Handbook of communication science (pp. 540–563). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Bowen, M. (1993). Family therapy in clinical practice. Lanham: Jason Aronson.
Cabrera, N., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Bradley, R. H., Hofferth, S., & Lamb, M. E. (2000). Fatherhood in the twenty-first century. Child Development, 71(1), 127–136.
Caliendo, M., & Kopeinig, S. (2008). Some practical guidance for the implementation of propensity score matching. Journal of Economic Surveys, 22(1), 31–72.
Carlson, M. J., & Corcoran, M. E. (2001). Family structure and children’s behavioral and cognitive outcomes. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(3), 779–792.
Chen, F., Liu, G., & Mair, C. A. (2011). Intergenerational ties in context: Grandparents caring for grandchildren in China. Social Forces, 90(2), 571.
Crosnoe, R., & Elder, Jr, G. H. (2004). Family dynamics, supportive relationships, and educational resilience during adolescence. Journal of Family Issues, 25(5), 571–602.
Deary, I. J., Strand, S., Smith, P., & Fernandes, C. (2007). Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence, 35(1), 13–21.
Dehejia, R. H., & Wahba, S. (2002). Propensity score-matching methods for nonexperimental causal studies. Review of Economics and Statistics, 84(1), 151–161.
Dreby, J. (2006). Honor and virtue: Mexican parenting in the transnational context. Gender & Society, 20(1), 32–59.
Dufur, M. J., Howell, N. C., Downey, D. B., Ainsworth, J. W., & Lapray, A. J. (2010). Sex differences in parenting behaviors in single‐mother and single-father households. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(5), 1092–1106.
Fiese, B. H., Foley, K. P., & Spagnola, M. (2006). Routine and ritual elements in family mealtimes: Contexts for child well-being and family identity. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2006(111), 67–89.
Gentzler, A. L., Contreras-Grau, J. M., Kerns, K. A., & Weimer, B. L. (2005). Parent–child emotional communication and children’s coping in middle childhood. Social Development, 14(4), 591–612.
Giannelli, G. C., & Mangiavacchi, L. (2010). Children’s schooling and parental migration: empirical evidence on the ‘left-behind’ generation in Albania. Labour, 24(s1), 76–92.
Gryczkowski, M. R., Jordan, S. S., & Mercer, S. H. (2010). Differential relations between mothers’ and fathers’ parenting practices and child externalizing behavior. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 19(5), 539–546.
Hilton, J. M., & Devall, E. L. (1998). Comparison of parenting and children’s behavior in single-mother, single-father, and intact families. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 29(3–4), 23–54.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., & Avila, E. (1997). I’m here but I’m there: The meanings of Latina transnational motherhood. Gender & Society, 11(5), 548–560.
Huebner, A. J., Mancini, J. A., Wilcox, R. M., Grass, S. R., & Grass, G. A. (2007). Parental deployment and youth in military families: Exploring uncertainty and ambiguous loss. Family Relations, 56(2), 112–122.
Jia, Z., & Tian, W. (2010). Loneliness of left-behind children: A cross-sectional survey in a sample of rural China. Child: Care, Health and Development, 36(6), 812–817.
Jordan, L. P., & Graham, E. (2012). Resilience and well‐being among children of migrant parents in South-East Asia. Child Development, 83(5), 1672–1688.
Kandel, W., & Kao, G. (2001). The impact of temporary labor migration on Mexican children’s educational aspirations and performance. International Migration Review, 35(4), 1205–1231.
Lamb, M. E. (Ed.) (2004). The role of the father in child development. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Lechner, M. (2001). Identification and estimation of causal effects of multiple treatments under the conditional independence assumption. In M. Lechner, F. Pfeiffer (Eds.), Econometric evaluation of labour market policies (pp. 43–58). New York: Physica-Verlag HD.
Lee, J. S., & Bowen, N. K. (2006). Parent involvement, cultural capital, and the achievement gap among elementary school children. American Educational Research Journal, 43(2), 193–218.
Levin, K. A., & Currie, C. (2010). Family structure, mother-child communication, father-child communication, and adolescent life satisfaction: A cross-sectional multilevel analysis. Health Education, 110(3), 152–168.
Liang, Z., & Chen, Y. P. (2007). The educational consequences of migration for children in China. Social Science Research, 36(1), 28–47.
Löwe, B., Kroenke, K., & Gräfe, K. (2005). Detecting and monitoring depression with a two-item questionnaire (PHQ-2). Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 58(2), 163–171.
Luk, W., Farhat, T., Iannotti, J., & Simons-Morton, G. (2010). Parent–child communication and substance use among adolescents: Do father and mother communication play a different role for sons and daughters? Addictive Behaviors, 35(5), 426–431.
Marsiglio, W., Amato, P., Day, R. D., & Lamb, M. E. (2000). Scholarship on fatherhood in the 1990s and beyond. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(4), 1173–1191.
McGill, B. S. (2014). Navigating new norms of involved fatherhood: Employment, fathering attitudes, and father involvement. Journal of Family Issues, 35(8), 1089–1106.
Murphy, R. (2004). The impact of labor migration on the well-being and agency of rural Chinese women: cultural and economic contexts and the life course. In A. Gaetano & T. Jacka (Eds.), On the move: women in rural-to-urban migration in contemporary China (pp. 243–276). New York: Columbia University Press.
National Bureau of Statistics of China. (2013). What census data can tell us about children in China. UNICEF website: http://www.unicef.cn/cn/uploadfile/2013/1216/20131216110856330.pdf
Nobles, J. (2011). Parenting from abroad: Migration, nonresident father involvement, and children’s education in Mexico. Journal of Marriage and Family, 73(4), 729–746.
Parke, R. D. (2013). Gender differences and similarities in parental behavior. In B. Wilcox & K. Kline (Eds.), Gender and parenthood: biological and social scientific perspectives (pp. 120–163). New York: Columbia University.
Paul, A. M. (2017). Multinational maids: stepwise migration in a global labor market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peng, Y., & Wong, O. M. (2016). Who takes care of my left-behind children? Migrant mothers and caregivers in transnational child care. Journal of Family Issues, 37(14), 2021–2044.
Pomerantz, E. M., Moorman, E. A., & Litwack, S. D. (2007). The how, whom, and why of parents’ involvement in children’s academic lives: More is not always better. Review of Educational Research, 77(3), 373–410.
Pottinger, A. M. (2005). Children’s experience of loss by parental migration in inner-city Jamaica. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 75(4), 485–496.
Preacher, K. J., & Hayes, A. F. (2004). SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(4), 717–731.
Rodriguez, R.M. (2017). Domestic insecurities: Female migration from the Philippines, development and national subject-status. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies website: https://ccis.ucsd.edu/_files/wp114.pdf
Schafer, J. (1999). Multiple imputation: A primer. Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 8, 3–15.
Schweinhart, L. J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W. S., Belfield, C. R., & Nores, M. (2005). Lifetime Effects: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study through Age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: High Scope Educational Research Foundation.
Scott-Jones, D. (1995). Parent-child interactions and school achievement. In B. Ryan, G. Adams, T. Gullotta, R. Weissberg, & R. Hampton (Eds), The family-school connection: theory, research, and practice (pp. 75–107). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Simons, L. G., & Conger, R. D. (2007). Linking mother–father differences in parenting to a typology of family parenting styles and adolescent outcomes. Journal of Family Issues, 28(2), 212–241.
Simpkins, S. D., Fredricks, J., & Eccles, J. S. (2015). Parent beliefs to youth choices: Mapping the sequence of predictors from childhood to adolescence. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 80(2), 1–151.
Sobel, M. E. (1982). Asymptotic confidence intervals for indirect effects in structural equation models. Sociological Methodology, 13, 290–312.
Steinberg, L., & Silk, J. S. (2002). Parenting adolescents. In M. Bornstein (Ed), Handbook of parenting (pp. 103–133). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Steiner, P. M., Cook, T. D., Shadish, W. R., & Clark, M. H. (2010). The importance of covariate selection in controlling for selection bias in observational studies. Psychological Methods, 15(3), 250.
Straus, M. A., Sugarman, D. B., & Giles-Sims, J. (1997). Spanking by parents and subsequent antisocial behavior of children. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 151(8), 761–767.
Su, S., Li, X., Lin, D., Xu, X., & Zhu, M. (2013). Psychological adjustment among left‐behind children in rural China: the role of parental migration and parent–child communication. Child: Care, Health and Development, 39(2), 162–170.
Sun, X., Tian, Y., Zhang, Y., Xie, X., Heath, M. A., & Zhou, Z. (2015). Psychological development and educational problems of left-behind children in rural China. School Psychology International, 36(3), 227–252.
Waizenhofer, R. N., Buchanan, C. M., & Jackson-Newsom, J. (2004). Mothers’ and fathers’ knowledge of adolescents’ daily activities: its sources and its links with adolescent adjustment. Journal of Family Psychology, 18(2), 348–360.
Wang, S. X. (2014). The effect of parental migration on the educational attainment of their left-behind children in rural China. The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 14(3), 1037–1080.
Wang, M. T., & Eccles, J. S. (2012). Social support matters: Longitudinal effects of social support on three dimensions of school engagement from middle to high school. Child Development, 83(3), 877–895.
Wang, W. D., & Li, P. W. (2015). Psychometric report for the ability tests of CEPS baseline survey. Beijing: Center for Survey Research and Statistics, Renmin University, China.
Wen, M., & Lin, D. (2012). Child development in rural China: Children left behind by their migrant parents and children of nonmigrant families. Child Development, 83(1), 120–136.
Wen, M., Su, S., Li, X., & Lin, D. (2015). Positive youth development in rural China: The role of parental migration. Social Science & Medicine, 132, 261–269.
Yeung, W. J., Sandberg, J. F., Davis‐Kean, P. E., & Hofferth, S. L. (2001). Children’s time with fathers in intact families. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(1), 136–154.
Zhang, H., Behrman, J. R., Fan, C. S., Wei, X., & Zhang, J. (2014). Does parental absence reduce cognitive achievements? Evidence from rural China. Journal of Development Economics, 111, 181–195.
Zhao, Q., Yu, X., Wang, X., & Glauben, T. (2014). The impact of parental migration on children’s school performance in rural China. China Economic Review, 31, 43–54.
Ziegler, A., König, I. R., & Thompson, J. R. (2008). Biostatistical aspects of genome‐wide association studies. Biometrical Journal, 50, 8–28.
Author Contributions
Y.X.: conceived and executed the study, conducted data analyses, and wrote the paper. D.X.: collaborated with the data analysis and writing of the study. S.S.: helped conceptualize the paper and collaborated in the writing. M.W.: collaborated in the writing and editing of the final manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval
This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.
Additional information
Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix
Appendix
Bivariate regressions between covariates and key independent and outcome variables
Both parents absent (1) | Father absent (2) | Mother absent (3) | Chinese midterm score (4) | Math midterm score (5) | English midterm score (6) | Cognitive ability assessment (7) | Depressive symptoms assessment (8) | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Female | 0.954 | 0.870 | 0.632*** | 0.388*** | 0.085*** | 0.449*** | −0.011 | 0.107*** |
(0.062) | (0.065) | (0.082) | (0.022) | (0.023) | (0.022) | (0.019) | (0.021) | |
Whether single child | 0.515*** | 0.756** | 1.572*** | 0.078** | 0.114*** | 0.109*** | 0.200*** | −0.101*** |
(0.043) | (0.067) | (0.206) | (0.025) | (0.026) | (0.025) | (0.021) | (0.024) | |
Whether had serious illness before elementary school | 1.756*** | 1.168 | 1.715** | −0.147*** | −0.144*** | −0.178*** | −0.108*** | 0.355*** |
(0.160) | (0.133) | (0.290) | (0.034) | (0.036) | (0.035) | (0.029) | (0.034) | |
Preschool attendance after the age of three | 0.730*** | 0.820* | 0.967 | 0.116*** | 0.148*** | 0.171*** | 0.247*** | −0.164*** |
(0.052) | (0.069) | (0.140) | (0.026) | (0.027) | (0.026) | (0.021) | (0.025) | |
Starting age of elementary school | 0.843*** | 0.874*** | 0.926 | 0.054*** | 0.055*** | 0.085*** | 0.085*** | −0.030** |
(0.025) | (0.030) | (0.053) | (0.010) | (0.011) | (0.010) | (0.009) | (0.010) | |
Whether had school transfer in elementary school | 1.895*** | 1.514*** | 1.105 | 0.017 | 0.014 | −0.053* | −0.083*** | 0.176*** |
(0.126) | (0.117) | (0.148) | (0.024) | (0.025) | (0.024) | (0.020) | (0.023) | |
Whether skipped grades in elementary school | 1.553 | 0.718 | 2.126* | −0.393*** | −0.383*** | −0.250** | −0.166* | 0.105 |
(0.361) | (0.251) | (0.792) | (0.090) | (0.094) | (0.091) | (0.076) | (0.088) | |
Whether repeated grades in elementary school | 1.983*** | 1.517*** | 1.324* | −0.193*** | −0.268*** | −0.360*** | −0.323*** | 0.157*** |
(0.140) | (0.126) | (0.187) | (0.026) | (0.027) | (0.026) | (0.022) | (0.026) | |
Family wealth level before elementary school | 0.702*** | 0.769*** | 0.630*** | 0.103*** | 0.075*** | 0.151*** | 0.186*** | −0.243*** |
(0.038) | (0.047) | (0.061) | (0.019) | (0.020) | (0.019) | (0.016) | (0.018) | |
Whether mother graduated from junior middle school | 0.613*** | 0.778** | 0.910 | 0.185*** | 0.180*** | 0.244*** | 0.199*** | −0.209*** |
(0.041) | (0.060) | (0.120) | (0.023) | (0.024) | (0.024) | (0.020) | (0.023) | |
Whether father graduated from junior middle school | 0.776*** | 0.920 | 0.906 | 0.159*** | 0.135*** | 0.213*** | 0.171*** | −0.134*** |
(0.059) | (0.083) | (0.137) | (0.027) | (0.028) | (0.027) | (0.023) | (0.026) | |
Whether have family member with chronic illness | 1.359*** | 0.949 | 1.679*** | −0.045 | −0.073* | −0.023 | −0.124*** | 0.067* |
(0.117) | (0.102) | (0.259) | (0.031) | (0.032) | (0.031) | (0.026) | (0.030) |
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Xu, Y., Xu, D., Simpkins, S. et al. Does It Matter Which Parent is Absent? Labor Migration, Parenting, and Adolescent Development in China. J Child Fam Stud 28, 1635–1649 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01382-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01382-z