Parental Migration and the Health and Nutritional Outcomes of Left-Behind Children in China

China has experienced unparalleled economic growth and urbanization over the past four decades. Due to the enormous demand for labor in cities, rural to urban migration has increased substantially. The number of rural migrants was 286.5 million in 2017, comprising about 35 per-cent of China’s total labor force (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2017). In cities, howev-er, rural migrant workers are disadvantaged: they are exposed to discrimination in workplaces and obstacles such as financial constraints. Moreover, China’s household registration system (Hukou) prevents migrant parents from migrating with their children (Jordan, Ren, and Falking-ham, 2014). The resulting issue of left-behind children has attracted people’s attention in recent years. In rural China, there are about 61 million children left behind, which is 38 percent of rural children and 22 percent of the total children across the country (Hou, 2014). The lack of parental care and support could generate a set of developmental challenges for left-behind children. Previous studies have mainly examined how parental migration affects the educational outcomes and time allocation patterns of left-behind children. This paper, how-ever, focuses on examining the effects of fathers’ migration on the physical health status of left-behind children in rural China. According to the All-China Women’s Federations Research Group (ACWF), left-behind children (LBC) refer to a group of disadvantaged rural children who grow up without one parent or both, because their parent(s) left them and migrated to other cities in search of better jobs and wages. As a consequence, these children are often cared for by relatives, mostly by grandparents with little or no education, by family friends or by themselves. In my paper, LBC are defined as rural children with both or one parent absent in the household, excluding those with divorced, widowed or separated parents. I examine how the migration status of the father affects LBC nu-tritional status due to limited cases of mother’s migration and migration of both parents in my data. I identify fathers as migrant workers if they were not living in the household at the time of interview. Regarding the child’s nutritional status, there are many possible indicators such as an-thropometric measurements (e.g., height and weight), low birth weight and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. I used anthropometric measures as the outcome variables in my study since Eveleth (1996) strongly recommends using anthropometric measurements to evaluate the health status of children and adolescents. To study the relationship between fathers’ migration and children’s health status, I first perform a cross-sectional analysis using the 2011 wave of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). I observe a significant and negative relationship between a father’s migration and his children’s health outcomes. Then, I carry out fixed effects regressions that account for time-in-variant heterogeneity for each household. Results of the panel regressions contrast with those of the cross-sectional regressions: fathers’ migration has a small but significantly positive impact on the height of left-behind children. The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, I review some previ-ous articles to better understand the potential relationship between parental migration and chil-dren’s health outcomes, focusing on how family considerations affect individuals’ migration de-cisions in part A and whether household income affects children’s health status in part B. The third part of section II considers previous papers that have studied the relationship between parental migration and relevant child outcomes, including time allocation patterns, educational results, and health and nutrition outcomes. In part III, I describe the data and the summary sta-tistics. In section IV, I set up the cross-sectional and panel econometric models, and I report the empirical results in part V. Finally, section VI provides conclusions and some policy implications of the observed findings.

• http://hdl.handle.net/10393/38766