父母外出务工对农村留守儿童身心健康的影响研究

基于2015-2016年五个国定贫困县137所农村小学两期追踪调查数据,文章利用倾向得分匹配与差分模型相结合的方法实证分析了农村劳动力外出务工对留守儿童身心健康的影响及其作用机制。研究发现,父母外出总体上并不会影响儿童的身体健康,但对儿童的心理健康有显著的消极影响。进一步的检验发现,父母外出务工的"分离效应"会显著降低儿童的身心健康水平,而"收入效应"会显著改善儿童的身心健康,抵消"分离效应"的负面影响。在留守儿童规模不断扩大的背景下,充分发挥父母外出的"收入效应",减少"分离效应"是缓解农村留守儿童身心健康问题的基本思路。

Study on the Effect of Rural Labor Migration on Left-behind Children's Physical and Mental Health

Using survey data collected from 137 rural primary schools in Hebei and Sichuan provinces from 2015 to 2016, this paper analyses the effect of parental immigration on left-behind children's mental and physical health with the combination of differencing model and propensity score matching. We find that parental migration doesn't affect children's physical health, but has significant negative effect on children's mental health. Further tests show that mother's migration has greater negative effect on children' health than that of fathers' migration and that parental migration has greater negative effect on boy's health than on girl. And we find that the negative effect of parental migration on children's health will be enlarged as time goes by. These result support the existence of "Separation Effect". Additionally, tests about "Income Effect" show that parents, working in other cities, who sent more money back home have less negative effect on their children's health. It means that "Income Effect" may improve children's health condition and reduce the negative effect of "Separation Effect" on children's health. Under the background of continuously increasing number of left-behind children, it is the basic way to solve the left-behind children's health problem to make full use of the positive effect of "Income Effect" and reduce the negative effect of "Separation Effect".