“Do Mom and Dad Still Love Me?” – Left-Behind Children

Children in rural China are left behind by the millions as their parents migrate to the cities in search of work. Loneliness and a feeling of not being loved is already taking its toll among them. Amity now helps a church in Henan to set up a program for these kids. – By Beate Engelen

Jinjin grows up waiting for her father to come back home. Not because her parents are divorced. Her father is a migrant worker. He drifts wherever he finds a job in one of the economically stronger regions of China, returning to his home in Henan Province only once a year. This year, he works in Ningbo, a rich seaport more than ten hours away by train. When he comes back for a short vacation, he might bring a few presents, Jinjin hopes.

At the opening ceremony of the summer camp

Being separated from their children is the fate of several ten million people in China, men and women, who are unable to find work near home but nonetheless need to feed their families. Many cannot afford to take their children along to the big cities. It is often the extended family or neighbors at home who look after them. Some children even live without a guardian – all by themselves. How many of these there are is unclear. According to official statistics 20 million children had been left behind by their migrant parents in 2007, but some experts say the number is as high as 70 million.

Leaving rural children in the care of others for economic reasons is not a new development in China. Since the 1980s, when farmers were first allowed to seek jobs in cities eager to attract cheap labor, rural children have been growing up without their parents. But people are only now waking up to the problem since a host of negative effects is beginning to show.

Ensuing problems

Fear is growing among officials that children with psychological problems caused by separation from their parents could not only hurt those directly involved but society as a whole. Children of migrant workers who are not properly supervised are abducted and trafficked in increasing numbers, yet this is not the only reason to worry. Many of the problems among left-behind children like drug abuse, dropping out of or doing poorly at school, lack of social skills or even membership in criminal gangs start with psychological strains due to neglect.

Children feel rejected because they often do not understand why their parents left, where they are and what they do. “When parents leave for a long time children start asking themselves: Do Mom and Dad still love me?” explains Zhao Fang, a professor of social work at Nanjing Normal University who has volunteered for Amity. Most parents simply do not know how to keep communication with their children alive over a long distance, says Zhao Fang, and guardians at home can be just as helpless. When children feel sad and lonely they are told that things are not so bad after all. Their caretakers just ignore the fact that children need empathy and hugs more than anything at such a moment.

Zhao Jinjin, almost 12. Her father spends most of his time in the cities of the east to support the family. Her mother is at home taking care of her and her two siblings.

Jinjin feels lucky because her mother is still at home and her father talks with her on the phone, making plans to travel with her to Ningbo. Not all of the children enjoy this kind of affection. Zhang Meng’en, a thirteen-year-old boy, still seems upset because his mother left him ten years ago, when he was only three. She left to become a migrant worker. Meng’en has not seen her since. He now lives with his grandfather because his father has also become a migrant worker.

A church steps in

This summer the church in Linying and the Christian Council of Luohe in Henan Province has decided to launch a pilot project which aims at helping the local left-behind children. Problems associated with these children are rising in the area. Linying is a small backwater in the eastern part of Henan. The land is flat, crisscrossed by the tributaries of the Yellow River. Floods regularly destroy the harvest and kill people. But they also wash in the fertile soil needed for growing crops. Soil quality is not bad. Farmers are able to grow enough to get by – but not more.

Zhang Meng'en, 13, lives with his grandfather. When he was only 3 years old, his mother left the family. His father works as a migrant worker.

Many of those who need to earn a living and want to send their children to school become migrant workers. With many young parents gone off for work, the number of left-behind children is rising. In Linying alone, there are almost 30,000 of them. Most see their parents once a year or less. Now, the church is determined to step in.

A summer camp was held for 100 left-behind children between the age of six and thirteen. They stayed at four different church buildings for ten days, sleeping on straw mats in large dorms. Pots and pans the size of bathtubs were brought in for the kitchen staff to cook enough noodles, soup and vegetables to feed the hungry crowd. Volunteering teachers from the local middle school offered to teach the children math, English, dancing, music, arts, geography and history – a schedule which does not sound like care-free summertime fun. But unlike children in Western countries who look for camping and boating adventures, students in China expect study input during summer camp. For the children of farmers, the activity was a special treat because summer camps are normally a privilege of students from the cities.

High expectations

The camp was the first of its kind and therefore caused a few headaches among organizers. Some lessons were learned the hard way when, all of a sudden, it turned out that no activities had been planned for the children between dinner and bed-time. Or, when teachers tried to give psychological support to alienated children by explaining to them that their parents were “doing something valuable for the development of China”, it became clear that counseling methods can still be improved.

Yao Jingyang, 10. Both of her parents are migrant workers. She lives with her grandparents.

But even though members of the congregations still lacked psychological knowledge and experience with organizing a camp, those who were mobilized were keen on making a difference. They played with the kids, provided psychological counseling as best they could, arranged to teach courses or prepared meals, strengthening their own communal spirit at the same time.

Even before it started, the program had already become very popular among local families, who very much wanted their children to attend. Children like Jinjin and Meng’en were lucky to join: many more applied than could be taken on.

Because expectations were so high, everyone worked to make the camp a success. The efforts eventually paid off. After ten days at the camp most of the children were happy and “no-one ran away”, says Amity staff Tian Meimei, who supervised the activities.

More dominant role for churches

This program, supported by Germany’s United Evangelical Mission, is brand new but it is not the first project the four congregations of Linying have carried out. The local church has been a fairly strong social factor for some time now. 20% of local people are Christians – a big number compared to the national average, which is often quoted as 4%. For many years, the church has been active in small-scale poverty alleviation efforts, distribution of free medicine, AIDS prevention and psychological counseling for church members. It is therefore in a good position to provide help for the children as well. “The church enjoys widespread trust among the people,” says a report written by Niu Xiaolu and Zhang Yang, two Amity volunteers who took part in the program. “Family members feel comfortable leaving their children in the care of church people”.

One reason for this could be that the church has a broader vision of the personal development of left-behind children than the local schools. The church provided a one-day training for volunteering teachers and church workers to make them understand the fragile nature of the children’s mental health and learn the basics of child psychology. “The schools don’t provide psychological training for teachers,” explains one of the pastors, “because they only worry about the students’ grades.” Zhang Jumin, a teacher at a local middle school and member of the church, goes even further than this. He says he is discouraged by his school from offering mental guidance to students with psychological problems: “So, I do it privately at church.”

Other church members, too, believe that the church should be involved in helping left-behind children: “As Christians, we are responsible that children don’t turn bad and end up in prison. We need to show them our love as Jesus did,” says Li Guiju, a 46-year-old Christian.

Her attitude and call for action is part of a larger shift in Chinese churches. In many places, the church wants to become a beacon of socially responsible conduct. This is not an entirely new development but it has become stronger after Chinese President Hu Jintao endorsed church involvement for the sake of social stability in the fall of 2007.

In Linying, a multi-storied church that is being built and will open around Christmas, has already included an extra floor for youth activities. “For us,” says Pastor Zang from Luohe’s Christian Council, “it is an opportunity to show society as a whole that the church is good for China.”

(Amity staff Tian Meimei and Wang Baocheng have contributed to this article.)

Coping with mental stress

Psychological counseling to relieve mental stress in children is rarely offered in China. Even when schools make an effort to introduce programs which provide psychological support, the so-called experts are often students themselves who have not received any formal training. After the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, when it became obvious that traumatized children needed urgent psychological help, first steps were taken to offer sophisticated “psychological first-aid”. But in many parts of China there is still no awareness of the fact that some children need professional help in their development to cope with mental stress, mood swings or even depression.

Amity is trying to raise awareness in this field. Before the summer camp in Linying started, Amity held a one-day training course for summer camp staff, Sunday-school teachers and local middle school teachers. Participants learned about child psychology, special challenges of left-behind children and ways of properly handling problems they might encounter. In addition, volunteering students from a Nanjing university introduced new methods of finding out what goes on in children’s minds even if they cannot express their feelings in words. The children were encouraged to draw all those people in their family they loved. The result was a surprising mix of people of different generations, farm animals and pets. Some of the children omitted absent parents and added their cat (see picture).