Stay-at-home children

Instead, he sat on the doorstep sobbing¹. "They are leaving for Xiamen tomorrow, and I don't want to let them go," he cried.

It was the first Spring Festival in three years in which his parents had managed to come back to their hometown in the eastern part of Ningde, Fujian Province, to spend the holiday with him.

Luo is not alone. Government statistics show that more than 20 million children in rural areas whose parents have left home to search for work in the city.

The problem has reached a national scale as more and more migrant workers from across China answer the call of employers in the country's booming cities.

The splitting up of families poses a challenge to traditional household structures and approaches to child-rearing, said Xie Guangxiang, deputy secretary-general of Anhui Provincial² Government.

In a proposal to the ongoing³ National Committee of the CPPCC, Xie urged the whole country to think seriously about the situation.

Among the potential problems stay-at-home children face are the absence of any sort of family education, degraded school records and other psychological problems.

A survey of people in Jingmen, Hubei Province, showed that stay-at-home local children suffer from poor living conditions, lagging educational attainment⁴, insecurity and difficultly in communication.

The survey, conducted by the All-China Women's Federation⁵ (ACWF) in May last year, involved 181 children, 95 boys and 86 girls. The results were published last week on the federation's website.

Some 87.9 percent of the children surveyed said they were willing to stay with their parents. About 90 percent said they felt insecure when they were left alone.

The five most pressing concerns for such children are tutoring, psychological help, security, financial support and communications.

To deal with the issue, a dozen government-related bodies, including the Office of the Rural Workers United Conference under the State Council and ACWF, set up a working panel in October last year.

The panel is to cooperate with other government bodies, including the Education, Public Security and Finance ministries⁶, to gradually put in place laws and regulations to safeguard the rights of stay-at-home children.