Rural children need a safety net
Sun ShangwuChina Daily  Updated: 2005-09-10 07:41

A 13-year-old junior middle school girl from Fushun county in Southwest China's Sichuan Province gave birth to a baby last March, with nobody realizing that she was pregnant. This misfortune has been blamed on the absence of parental custody.

The girl is one of least 10 million such children, under the age of 15, around the country: their parents leave them at homes in rural areas to go to the cities in search of jobs.

They are usually taken care of by their grandparents or other relatives. The absence of parental presence in their lives has generated many problems and is inviting wide attention in China.

Media and sociologists have coined a special term for them: "liushou ertong" or "left-behind children in rural China."

The College of Humanities and Development with the China Agriculture University worked recently with Plan China, an international charity working in 45 countries, to investigate the countryside in central and western China. The results are alarming.

Nearly 65 per cent of the surveyed children contact their parents only once a week, mostly over phone, while nearly 9 per cent of them have never reached their parents, according to the survey.

The investigation covered 10 villages in 10 counties in the provinces and regions of Shaanxi, Ningxia, Hebei and Beijing.

The report shows that in 82 percent of the surveyed families, usually it was the fathers who left home for the cities. For 15.5 per cent of the children, both parents had migrated.

The absence of parental care affects them psychologically, said Ye Jingzhong, a professor with the China Agriculture University. These children are usually unsociable, anxiety-prone, selfish and sometimes even suffer from infantile autism, which prevents them from communicating with others.

The education authorities in Renshou county in Southwest China's Sichuan Province surveyed 2,000 children whose parents went out to work in cities and found that 48 per cent of them had "bad academic performance," and 40 per cent just "middle-level performance."

Many tragedies involving such children have been reported in the Chinese media.

Xinhua reported that a couple of Duchang county in central Jiangxi Province, worked in Dongguan city in southern Guangdong Province and left their daughter at home.

The girl, Jiang Menglan, fell from a two-deck bed in her dorm in a middle school. As she did not live with the parents, nobody found out that she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and later died.

As China is witnessing rapid urbanization, more farmers are seeking employment in the cities to boost their income.

It is reported that at least 150 million farmers are now working in cities. But the high living costs in cities and the busy lives of migrant workers prevent them from taking their children with them.

Certain rules, such as the registered permanent residence system, also act as obstacles.

Migrant workers who do not have the permanent residence permit, encounter many difficulties in the cities, such as being asked for additional fees for schooling.

In cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, some special schools have been set up to accommodate children of migrant workers. But they are usually poorly-equipped and the quality of teaching is not satisfactory.

Government support and care are urgently needed for creating a qualified schooling environment for these children. It must give more attention to rural schooling.

For children who cannot accompany their parents to the cities, rural schools play an important role in their growth. But owing to a lack of funds, rural schools lag behind those in urban areas.

Without government support, it is hard to expect rural schools to provide a satisfying environment for rural children.

In the densely-populated villages, government must think about setting up kindergartens and clinics to relieve the burden on those to whose care these children are entrusted.

Some rural schools have launched pilot programmes to explore ways of better helping students whose parents are away in cities.

For example, the Linzi Primary School in Rugao city in East China's Jiangsu Province has set up a special working committee for such children.

Family information of these children is included in their personal files, which allows teachers to know them better. Teachers have found it useful to identify problems and offer solutions.

And last but not the least, parents of these children must shoulder their own responsibilities because parental care is irreplaceable in a child's life.

Some parents were found to be harbouring the wrong notion that their responsibility for education was just to provide the money.

But actually, it is their presence that is crucial to children in their formative years.

If parents are not able to live with their children, they must at least maintain contact with them regularly.

(China Daily 09/10/2005 page4)

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