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

Huajun Wu, Zhiyong Cai, Qing Yan, Yi Yu and Ning Neil Yu
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Huajun Wu: School of Economics, Nanjing Audit University, Nanjing 211815, China
Zhiyong Cai: School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China
Qing Yan: Wuxi Development and Reform Research Center, Wuxi 214000, China
Yi Yu: School of Economics, Nanjing Audit University, Nanjing 211815, China
Ning Neil Yu: Institute for Social and Economic Research, Nanjing Audit University, Nanjing 211815, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 5, 1-12

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.

Keywords: left-behind experience; mental health; late adolescents; college freshmen; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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