Work

The Impact of Childhood Left-Behind Experience on the Mental Health of Late Adolescents: Evidence from Chinese College Freshmen

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: A paucity of public service afforded to migrant workers often begets a wide range of social problems. In China, hundreds of millions of migrant worker parents have to leave children behind in their hometowns. This paper investigated the long-term effects of the childhood experience of being left behind on the mental well-being of late adolescents. Mandatory university personality inventory (UPI) surveys (involving psychosomatic problems such as anxiety, depression, and stress) were conducted at a university in Jiangsu, China, during 2014–2017. The study sample consisted of 15,804 first-year college students aged between 15 and 28 years. The PSM method and the OLS regression model were employed. Controlling for the confounding factors (gender, age, single-child status, hometown location, ethnicity, and economic status), our empirical investigation demonstrated that childhood left-behind experience significantly worsened the mental health of the study sample, increasing the measure of mental ill-being by 0.661 standard deviations (p < 0.01). Moreover, the effects were consistently significant in subsamples divided by gender, single-child status, and hometown location; and the effects were greater for females, single-child students, and urban residents.

Source: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18052778

Authors: Huajun Wu, Zhiyong Cai, Qing Yan, Yi Yu, Ning Neil Yu

Institutions: Nanjing Audit University, Nanjing Normal University, Stanford University

Language: English

Topic: Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development

Subfield: Clinical Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Good health and well-being, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,484