父母外出务工对农村留守儿童心理健康的影响:基于面板数据的研究

The Impact of Parental Migration on the Mental Health of Rural Left-Behind Children

本文利用2012年和2014年在陕西省38所农村初中的3486名学生的面板数据,以心理健康诊断测试量表(MHT)为测量指标,运用倍差分析法克服内生性问题分析父母外出务工对留守儿童心理健康的影响,探索解决父母外出务工对留守儿童心理健康带来负面影响的途径。研究表明,父母长期外出(四个月以上)会对留守儿童心理健康带来负面影响,对于心理过渡阶段的初中生,父母的返乡并不能对其心理健康进行有效修复;但当父母外出务工时间缩减为四个月以下时,父母的外出务工将不会对其子女心理健康带来明显的负面影响。

The paper uses the panel data of 3,486 students from 38 rural junior schools during 2012 and 2014 in Shaanxi Province along with Mental Health Test(MHT) as a measure of mental health.We use the difference-in-difference analysis method to overcome the endogenous problem to analyze the impact of parental long-term migration on left-behind children's mental health;meanwhile,we also explore an effective method to alleviate the left-behind children's mental trauma.Research shows that the parental migration of more than four months has a significant negative impact on the students' mental health.Therefore,we explore the effective approach to solve the negative impact of parental migrant of more than four months on left-behind children mental health.We found that when parents return to living at home from migration,the MHT standardized scores of their children did not significantly change.But,we found that when parental migration was less than four months,the mental health of their children did not worsen significantly.The conclusion of this paper is that parental long-term migration has a negative impact on their mental health,and parental return cannot patch the left-behind children's deteriorated mental health condition,but,we can resolve the leftchildren's mental problem by reducing the parental migration time.