Technology to Support Family Connections
February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
An Exploration on Long-distance Communication between
Left-behind Children and Their Parents in China
Lu Pan1, Feng Tian1, 2*, Fei Lu1, Xiaolong Zhang3, Ying Liu4 , Wenxin Feng5, Guozhong Dai1, 2 and
Hongan Wang1, 2
1
3
Intelligence Engineering Lab, Institute of
Pennsylvania State University, USA
lzhang@ist.psu.edu
Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
4
Intel Corporation, China
{panlu, tf, lvfei, dgz, wha}@iel.iscas.ac.cn
2
ying.s.liu@intel.com
State Key Lab. of Computer Science,
5
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of
Computer Science Department, Boston
University, USA
Sciences, China
*
Corresponding author: tf@iel.iscas.ac.cn
wenxinf@bu.edu
ABSTRACT
In China, hundreds of millions of migrant workers have
moved to cities or coastal regions for more or better-paid
jobs and have left their children behind at their rural homes.
Separated by thousands of kilometers, these “left-behind”
children and their migrant parents use mobile phones as
their primary—and often only—method of maintaining
family connections. To better understand the use of
technology in this long-distance communication, we
conducted a multi-phased study using interviews and
surveys in three different Chinese rural areas. In this paper,
we report our findings on how these children communicate
with their migrant parents and what information they
exchange. We also discuss design implications derived
from these findings that may improve communication
between left-behind children and their parents.
Author Keywords
Long-distance communication; left-behind children; mobile
mediated contact.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m [Information
Miscellaneous.
interfaces
and
presentation]:
INTRODUCTION
The rapid economic development in China is associated
with a massive migration of workers from the countryside
to cities and coastal regions, as well as a huge number of
children who are left at home by their migrant parents.
According to official reports, there are more than 140
million migrant workers [1, 27] and 58 million “leftbehind” children [27] in China. Growing up with
grandparents or other relatives instead of their parents,
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these children often face challenges in their daily lives,
education, and personal development [10, 27].
On average, migrant workers can only return home about
once every two years. To maintain family connections and
keep communication open while separated by hundreds or
even thousands of kilometers, migrant workers and their
children rely on mobile phones, which are widely available
in rural China [11]. By using mobile phones, migrant
workers can talk with their children regularly.
Considering the huge number of left-behind children in
China, we believe it is important to investigate how they
and their migrant parents communicate and how technology
can help them. However, little research has been done to
study this matter. Existing studies on left-behind children
are largely in an international context, often looking at
transnational issues; these issues are not directly applicable
to Chinese left-behind children, whose migrant parents stay
in China. Also, while there are studies on social-level issues
concerning phone-based communication between leftbehind children and their migrant parents, few studies
examine the issues from a behavioral perspective, such as
how left-behind children communicate with their parents,
what information is exchanged between them, and whether
current phone technologies meet their needs.
To understand these matters, we conducted research on the
use of mobile phones between left-behind children and their
parents in China. We wanted to first understand the current
status of the communication between them, and then with
that knowledge, further explore what new designs and tools
on mobile phones are needed to support their needs.
The research is a three-phased investigation in three
Chinese provinces involving left-behind children, their
parents, and their school teachers. In the first phase, we
used semi-structured interviews to gather information about
the daily life of left-behind children in Henan and Anhui,
two of the 10 provinces with the greatest numbers of leftbehind children [27]. The goal of the research in this phase
was to identify the major problems left-behind children may
have encountered. In the second phase, we first developed a
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February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
questionnaire based on the information we gathered in the
first phase, and then conducted a survey study in a school in
Chongqing, a municipality in Southwest China where many
left-behind children can be found. The research in the third
phase was semi-structured interviews with left-behind
children and their migrant parents. The interviews helped us
better interpret the answers to the questionnaire with
information from multiple perspectives.
This paper presents a first step toward understanding longdistance communication between left-behind children and
their parents in China. In this paper, we first provide the
context of this study, showing the scale of the issues
concerning left-behind children. Then, we review related
research. Next, we describe our method and present the
findings of our research, and some design implications to
help migrant workers and left-behind children. Finally, we
discuss the limitations of our research and future research
directions.
CONTEXT
One of the driving forces behind the rapid Chinese
economic growth in the past three decades is migrant
workers. “Migrant workers” here refers to those people who
move from poor regions to cities or more developed regions
outside their hometown for more or better-paid jobs and
stay there for at least 6 months. According to official
reports, there were about 140 million migrant workers in
2008 [27]; in 2011 this number reached about 159 million
[1]. Among these workers, more than half (50.3%) crossed
the border of provinces. Almost sixty percent (58.2%) of
migrant workers are married.
Most migrant workers live in conditions not suitable for
families. About half (49.9%) get housing support from their
employers, but they usually share apartments with others or
live in temporary houses on work sites. Those who do not
get housing support from employers (about 41%) spend
about 16% of their monthly income on rent. Only 14.3%
rent apartments independently. The number of those who
can purchase their own house is a mere 0.7% [1].
In addition to poor housing, other factors also contribute to
the decision to leave their children at home. For example,
migrant workers have strenuous work schedules: almost 9
hours per day and 25 days per month. Furthermore, the
school systems in China are largely designed for local
residents, and cannot easily absorb children of migrant
workers.
The combination of factors such as these has led to a huge
number of children left home by their migrant parents.
There are an estimated 58 million left-behind children [27]
in China, with 52% of these children concentrated in six
provinces: Sichuan, Anhui, Henan, Hunan, Jiangxi, and
Guangdong. For more than half of these children, both
parents are migrant workers, and so the children usually
stay with grandparents or relatives. For example, for
children from 0 to 5 years old, about 40% are with
grandparents; for children from 6 to 11 years old, this
number is 38% [1].
News media and government agencies have recently begun
to pay greater attention to issues facing left-behind children,
such as family intimacy, physical and psychological wellbeing, education guardianship, and personal security. For
example, although more than 80% of left-behind children
were in school, most of their grandparents (about 80%) do
not have formal education beyond elementary school. In a
culture in which deep family involvement in a child’s
education is critical, this educational gap becomes a huge
concern of both migrant parents and society at large.
Some of these challenges are similar to those faced by leftbehind children in other countries (e.g., the Philippines)
[21]. Like the parents in those cultures, Chinese migrant
parents try to use technology to shorten the physical and
psychological distances between them and their children,
and to offer remote parenting using mobile phones.
RELATED WORK
Migrant workers and related social issues are a world-wide
concern [4]. Research has been done to understand various
aspects of migrant workers, such as related economics [26]
and its impacts on family [14]. Considering the focus of this
research, which is the use of technology by migrant workers
and their left-behind children to maintain family ties, we
narrow our review down to the areas of the impact of
migrant workers on their left-behind children, the
communication between children and parents, and technical
designs to enhance communication between children and
parents who are separated physically.
Impacts of Migrant Workers on Left-Behind Children
Relationships between migrant workers and their leftbehind children have drawn interest from researchers [14,
29]. Often researchers have taken a transnational
perspective to examine how parents and children, who live
in two different countries, interact with each other and
organize their work and life. An example of such studies is
by Parreñas [21], who studied how Filipino migrant
mothers and their young adult children overcame
international distance to achieve family intimacy.
Various studies have examined the impacts of parents’
absence on left-behind children from the perspectives of
education, health, and psychological development. For
education, Bryant’s review on existing research related to
the Philippines [3] indicated mixed findings: while the
remittances from migrant parents can help children perform
better in school, the absence of parents may also have
negative impact on educational achievement.
The impact of migration on children’s health is complicated.
On one hand, the remittance from migrant parents allows
left-behind children to access better healthcare facilities [5].
On the other hand, the absence of parents may lead to
health risks such as less preventive care [17].
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February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
Left-behind children may also face risks in their
psychological development. Children may see migration as
a path they would follow, and so become less interested in
school work [18]. In some countries, children of migrant
workers become the victims of social discrimination
because of the prejudices the society has against migrant
workers [20].
These studies offer a larger context in which to examine the
problems associated with left-behind children. A recent
report [9] echoed the concerns raised by researchers,
outlining some risks in the psychological development of
Chinese left-behind children, including anxiety over their
studies and difficulty in social interactions.
Communication between Children and Parents
Studies have found that frequent and regular
communication between migrant parents and left-behind
children can help to address certain problems left-behind
children may face. It has been found that phone calls from
Filipino migrant mothers can help the lives of their children
in various ways [21]. It should be noted that the perceived
effectiveness of such remote parenting on family intimacy
may vary. As the same research shows, while Filipino
mothers enjoyed remote parenting, their children sometimes
felt such phone calls could be interrupting and caused
anxiety.
Not surprisingly, parents and children often disagree on
how and what they should communicate. For example, it
has been found [31] that while parents often prefer
synchronous or asynchronous communication methods,
children strongly prefer face-to-face communication.
Dalsgaard et al. [7] partially attributed such disagreements
to the unequal relationship between parents and children.
Tools for Distant Family Communication
Studies have been done to explore new designs to support
long-distance family communication. Some designs focused
on systems to support family activities. Efforts have also
been made to create a common place in which distant
family members can work and play together [12, 15, 30].
For example, Pokaboo [24] now offers a network-based toy
that distant family members can play with together. Odom
et al. [20] examined communication practices in divorced
families, especially between the children and their distant
parent, and suggested that designs must consider the
cultures of two families.
Some studies argued that video chatting is helpful to family
communication [2]. Video-based systems have been
designed for children. For example, Raffle et al. [23]
developed a storytelling system to let distant grandparents
read stories to their grandchildren; Follmer et al. [10]
improved such systems by adding activity sharing, such as
games played by multiple people.
Some systems go beyond sharing space and playing games
together and try to support more complex family activities,
such as experience sharing. Globetoddler [19] is a system
that supports children and their traveling parents to share
information and experiences. Parents can upload pictures or
audio clips to the system, and the children can download
them with a doll. eKiss [6] allows children to upload their
phone pictures to a weblog so that their distant parents can
share their experiences.
To make family-oriented games or systems succeed, Davis
et al. [8] suggested that designers focus on four things
concerning the interaction between children and parents:
unity, inequality, reciprocity, and play. They also offered a
game, Virtual Box, as an example.
Designs targeting left-behind children are rare. One
exception is by Wong-Villacres and Bardzell [28], who
investigated left-behind children in Ecuador and suggested
that designs enable more experience sharing and encourage
children to take more initiative in communicating.
In summary, many studies have been done on migrant
workers and their children. It has been found that regular
communication between them can help to ease the problems
children may face. However, these studies usually focused
on the level of society, and did not examine the behavioral
issues related to communication between left-behind
children and their parents. At the same time, although there
are many studies on the use of technology to support the
communication between children and their distant family
members, little research has been done to examine the
needs and practices of left-behind children.
METHOD
To better understand the situations of left-behind children
and their communication with their parents, we took a
multi-phased approach. The work in the first phase was
preliminary interviews. We visited two schools where many
left-behind children studied and interviewed some leftbehind children as well as their teachers and school
principals. The information we gathered in this phase
focused on their daily life and how they communicated with
their parents. Research in Phase Two was a survey study.
Based on the information gathered in Phase One, we
designed a questionnaire focusing on gaining information
about the status of the communication between left-behind
children and their parents. The questionnaire was
distributed to left-behind children in a third school. The
third phase was semi-structured interviews with both leftbehind children and their migrant parents. The interviewees
were chosen randomly from questionnaire participants. Our
meetings with children were face-to-face, and we asked
them to elaborate their answers to the questionnaire. Our
interviews with parents were phone-based.
The research works in these three phases are interwoven.
The information gathered in the first phase lays the
foundations for the questionnaire design. The answers to
the questionnaire guide the design of interview questions in
Phase Three. The data from Phase Three not only helps us
gain deeper and more detailed information about the
communication between children and their parents, but also
allows us to validate the answers from Phase Two and have
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Technology to Support Family Connections
February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
a more comprehensive understanding of the matter by
taking inputs from both sides.
No
Gender
Age
Guardian
Father’s
Occupation
Mother’s
Occupation
Phase I: Interviewing Left-behind Children
1
F
11
Grandmother
Driver
Cleaner
We interviewed four children at two schools. The first
school was Youji Middle School in Lingbi County, Anhui
Province. The second was Beiguan Primary School in
Xin’an County, Henan Province. These two provinces are
among those where left-behind children are most highly
concentrated [27]. In Youji Middle School, more than 70%
of its students are classified as left-behind children. Most of
these students are boarders.
2
M
11
Aunt
Warehouse
Keeper
Factory
Worker
3
M
11
Cloth Seller
Cloth Seller
4
M
11
F
10
Machine
Repairer
Driver
Shoe Maker
5
6
F
11
Other
relative
Other
relative
Other
relative
Grandfather
7
M
12
Grandmother
8
M
12
Grandfather
Factory
Worker
Factory
Worker
Waitress
9
M
12
Other
relative
10
M
12
11
M
12
Other
relative
Grandfather
Factory
Worker
Factory
Worker
Factory
Worker
Machine
Repairer
Waiter
Miner
12
M
13
Grandparents
13
M
12
Grandfather
Factory
Worker
N/A
Watch
Repairer
N/A
14
F
11
Grandmother
N/A
N/A
15
F
11
Grandmother
N/A
N/A
Our investigation in Youji Middle School involved two leftbehind students, four school teachers, and the school
principal. With the help of the principal, we randomly
selected two students—a boy and a girl, both around 11 to
12 years old. One student lived with grandparents, and the
other was taken care of by the child’s aunt. We also met
four school teachers. Two of them taught in school, and
interacted with these two students mostly in the classroom.
The other two were in charge of boarding matters, and had
more contacts with the students outside the classroom.
We used semi-structured interviews and each interview
lasted between 30 to 45 minutes (Figure 1). For the leftbehind children, our interview had 28 questions covering:
•
•
•
•
basic information about the family and the guardians;
status of both family life and school life;
communication status with migrant parents; and
digital tools for long-distance communication, such as
a mobile phone or a compute
Cloth Seller
Repairman
N/A
N/A
Table 1: Background information of left-behind
children interviewed.
From the interviews, we found students had a feeling of
being alienated from their parents. Although they enjoyed
their school life very much and had good relationship with
their classmates and their teachers, they felt a psychological
distance between them and their parents, who were
physically far away. This feeling was observed from
students in both schools.
Figure 1. Interview with a student at Youji Middle School.
In our meetings with the school teachers and the principal,
we focused on obtaining information concerning the family
and school life of the students, as well as the digital tools
they may possess. Such information could help us to verify
the data we collected from students.
Our investigation in Beiguan Primary School was similar to
that in Youji Middle School, except that we selected two
younger students (also one male and one female), both aged
from 7 to 9, to interview. We did so for the purpose of
collecting data from more diverse samples. Both students
were under the custody of their grandparents. Our
interviews in this school were conducted in the same way as
that in the other school, except that we did not involve
teachers who were in charge of boarding life of their
students, because this school is not a boarding school.
Three issues may contribute to this problem. First, most of
these children’s parents came home only once every year or
two. They did not have sufficient time to communicate with
their children face-to-face. Second, the parents called their
children at most once a week, a frequency much lower than
what their children expected. Third, due to the feeling of
alienation and the nature of phone calls, the children tended
to focus on superficial issues that could be discussed
quickly, such as their daily lives and what grades they
earned, rather than more serious matters that are difficult to
dig into over the phone, such as the hurdles they encounter
in their studies, or the emotional and psychological needs
they have. The lack of the discussion of these deep issues
may make the children feel more alienated from their
parents.
These children communicated with their parents primarily
through mobile phones, and rarely used other devices (e.g.,
computers). All these children could easily access mobile
phones: they either had one themselves, or could use the
phone of their guardians. Although computer-based
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February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
communication methods (e.g., IM, social networks) are
popular among urban Chinese children, these rural, leftbehind children do not use computers for communication
purposes. Students in Youji Middle School could access
school computers during programming courses, but the use
of the computers was strictly limited to programming
purposes. Beiguan Primary School has no computer at all.
None of these students had a computer at home.
Students also reported some other issues in school, such as
popularity contests and peer pressure to get good clothes
and phones; these issues were confirmed by school teachers.
Compared with the feeling of alienation from their parents,
however, these issues were regarded by students as less
serious. Thus, we did not focus on them in our works in
Phases Two and Three.
Phase II: Survey Study
With the basic information about the live of left-behind
children and their communication with their parents, we
conducted a survey study. Our survey focused on the status
of communication between left-behind children and their
parents. We designed our questionnaire by focusing the
investigation on：
•
•
the work situation of the left-behind children’s parents;
the manner and frequency of communication between
left-behind children and their parents;
• the topics of communication expected by children;
• the use of communication devices;
• the comments on the communication methods by leftbehind children; and
• the expectations for mobile apps by left-behind
children and their parents.
Following the guidelines for questionnaire design [25], we
developed a questionnaire. Some of the questions included
were:
•
•
•
•
•
Where do your parents work?
Who are your guardians at home?
How often do your parents come back home?
How often do your parents contact you?
What topics do you usually talk about with your
parents?
• Do you have a mobile phone? If not, do your guardians
have one?
• What do you usually do with the mobile phone?
• Do you have a computer? If not, do your guardians
have one?
• Do you play games on the phone or the computer?
• If you do play games, what kind of games do you like?
• Are you online with the mobile phone or computer?
• What do you do usually when you are online?
We distributed the questionnaire to left-behind students in
Baishixiang Central Primary School in Chongqing, which is
a municipality in Southwest China where many left-behind
children can be found. We chose this school largely because
of our access to the school’s students.
We identified 46 students as eligible participants, all leftbehind children and all between the ages of 10 to 13 when
our study was conducted. We distributed the questionnaire
to all 46 students and got back 41.
Phase III: Interviews with Children and Parents
After collecting the questionnaires, we conducted in-depth,
semi-structured interviews with both the children and their
parents. Our goals here were two-fold: first, we wanted to
verify the answers from the students; and second, we hoped
to uncover the communication behaviors and expectations
of left-behind children and their parents that could not be
captured by the questionnaire.
We interviewed 15 randomly selected children from among
those who returned our questionnaire. The interviews were
face-to-face. Each interview took about half an hour. We
started our conversation with questions about their general
background. We then encouraged them to tell us about their
experiences communicating with their parents. Next, we
talked about the communication tools they currently used,
and asked them to elaborate how they used them and what
features they liked.
Table 1 shows the background information of the 15 leftbehind children we interviewed. Some of the children could
not provide us with complete information.
We also told these students that we wanted to talk to their
parents over the phone with the students present. They were
all happy to provide us with a phone number to reach their
parents. We could only reach the parents of 8 students. For
each parent, we conducted a half-hour long, semi-structured
interview. The procedure and questions were the same as
those in our interviews with students. Because the students
were present, our conversations with the parents also often
involved the students.
We audiotaped all of our interview sessions, and
transcribed and coded all of the interviews. Statements of
interest were extracted from each interview and grouped
together by themes that emerged in the process of
interviewing.
RESULTS
Basic Information of Left-Behind Children
Our survey data reveals that those students who answered
our questionnaire had at least one parent who is a migrant
worker: 43% indicated that both parents were migrant
workers, 37% said that their father was a migrant worker,
and 20% pointed to their mother. In terms of their guardians,
51% of them had a parent as the guardian, 44% had
grandparents, and 5% had other relatives (e.g., aunt).
The physical distances between left-behind children and
their parents varied. Among those students we interviewed,
nearly half of their migrant parents worked in Southern
China, such as Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, a city
almost 2000 km away from their children. About one-fifth
of parents worked in neighboring counties or provinces,
such as Chongqing, which is about 300 km in driving, and
Chengdu, Sichuan Province, a city at a driving distance of
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around 600 km. Because of the different distances, parents
went home with different frequencies: from once every
other week to once a year or more. Figure 2, generated from
the questionnaire, shows the distribution of the
homecoming frequency by migrant parents. As shown, the
majority of migrant parents came home once a year or more.
One child said that his parents had not been home for nearly
four years.
calls. Games, music, and internet surfing are the functions
they rarely touched. This may be related to their limited
leisure time and technical skills.
Figure 3. The distribution of main phone functions used
by left-behind children.
Personal Computer Use
Figure 2. The distribution of the homecoming frequency
by migrant parents.
Communication Channels and Devices
Communication Channels
Few left-behind children and their parents communicated
via letters. They considered this method old and slow. They
only used mail for packages, such as toys for children.
They preferred mobile phones for the convenience.
Although phone calls were not cheap, migrant parents
believed that the importance of the communication with
their children could justify the expense of phone calls, as
some parents indicated:
“I don’t care how much it costs if my child would like
to talk to me.”
“Communication costs are not a problem.”
Mobile Phone Use
The survey result shows that only 20% of left-behind
children had their own mobile phones, but for those without
a phone, they could use the phones of their guardians.
According to the questionnaire, children tended to use
mobile phones of their guardians. Most of the phones they
used were simple feature phones, not smartphones.
The use of personal computers among left-behind children
is fairly low. From the survey, we know that only one child
had a computer. Our interview data shows that it is hard for
migrant workers to afford a computer. Although
Baishixiang Central Primary School has a classroom
equipped with computers, the computers are for courserelated work only. Thus, the left-behind children’s exposure
to computers is very limited.
Furthermore, nearly all the parents said that they know little
about computers. They usually had a negative attitude
toward computers because of their association with
computer games, which are regarded as a distraction from
school work by most Chinese parents. As one parent said:
“I will not play computer games. Neither will my
daughter.”
Communication between Children and Migrant Parents
Because left-behind children and their migrant parents can
rarely meet, phone calls have become the most important
method of communication. We examined various aspects of
their phone calls, including the frequency, the topics, and
the depth of communication.
Figure 3 also comes from the questionnaire and shows the
distribution of the commonly used functions of mobile
phones by left-behind children. As shown, they mostly used
mobile phones to contact people, but equally important,
they also played games on mobile phones. Our interviews
with children confirmed the high frequency of playing
games on phones. The most popular games include jigsaws,
shooting-type games, and Mahjong. Some students also
used mobile phones to play music, and only a few did
Internet surfing with mobile phones. In comparison, most
migrant parents only used mobile phones to make phone
1152
Figure 4. The distribution of the frequency of
phone calls between children and their parents.
Technology to Support Family Connections
February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
Frequency of Communication
From the questionnaire, we got the frequency of phone calls,
as shown in Figure 4. As we can see, most children talked
to their parents once a week, while we also found one child
who had such communication once every three months.
Having a phone call once a week seems low, considering
the need to maintain communication from both sides and
the wide availability of mobile phones, so we asked the
children and parents to explain why they could not talk
more often. As we have learned, this is primarily due to the
busy work schedules of migrant parents: after they get off
the work every day, it has already past their children’s
bedtime. Thus, the weekend is the only time good for both.
It should be noted that many migrant workers work six days
a week, so they only have one day off per week.
All children, including the child who communicated with
parents once every three months, wanted more
communication time with their parents. Some hoped to
have daily conversations, although they knew their parents
were not able to do so.
Although children were eager to communicate with their
parents more, they usually did not initiate phone calls. Only
14% of the students in our study would initiate phone calls
to their parents. The majority, 54%, would wait for the calls
from parents. The rest, about 32%, would talk to their
parents after their guardians called the parents to discuss
various issues concerning the children.
These asymmetric roles of parents and left-behind children
in phone call initiation could be explained by the unequal
social relationship between them [7]. While parents bear
more family responsibilities and feel the need to pay
attention to their children’s development, children depend
on their parents and may not see the need to report their
every move to them. In our case, the feeling of alienation
by left-behind children may further reduce the feeling of
dependence on their parents and make it even less likely for
children to initiate phone calls to share their emotions with
parents. Another factor that prevents children from
initiating phone calls could be the lack of having their own
mobile phones.
Topics of Communication
We also investigated the topics involved in phone
conversations. Based on data from the interviews, we
identified three major topics: education, health, and work.
These topics account for more than 90% of the conversation
(Figure 5) (The data comes from the interview and means
the percentage of people who ever discussed that topic in
their calls.). The children’s education is the topic discussed
most (about 38% of the time). They also talked about issues
concerning the health of both the children and the parents
(about 28% of the time), and the work of the parents (25%
of the time). There were also other topics of conversation,
such as what the cities the parents work in look like.
Figure 5. The distribution of topics in phone calls
between left-behind children and migrant parents.
We asked both children and parents what information they
wanted to know about the other party. Children were
interested in knowing about the life, work, and health of
their parents. As some children put it:
“I want to know whether they had a good meal or
whether the work is hard.”
“I want to know what my parents’ work is like, and I
also want to go where they are.”
What migrant parents wanted from their children was
almost the same:
“I want to know everything, whether it is good or not.”
“I want to see more photos of my children.”
We also asked them what kinds of things they would not
share with the other party. For parents, this question was
hard to answer. They tended to emphasize the positive side
of their life as migrant workers, and hid from the children
the difficulties and challenges they faced in their work and
life. As one parent said:
“Some things cannot be said. Some things I can say,
but when they ask, I’ll only tell them the positive
aspects.”
The children apparently understood fully the situations of
their parents and the sacrifice their parents made. Thus, to
live up to the expectation for them by their parents, they did
not want to share such negative things as poor school
grades and difficulties in study and living, which would
make their parents disappointed and worried.
Depth of Communication
To know more about what they talked about over the phone,
we asked children and parents to elaborate on the
conversations they had. More than half of the children told
us that they would love to share with their parents events at
school and at home. However, what types of events to share
vary from child to child. Some children liked to tell their
parents only pleasant things, not sharing the problems they
had, such as poor grades or bad school experiences. As
some students put it:
“I don’t want to talk about school and life problems. I
don’t want them to worry.”
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“I’m embarrassed to tell them that I have been
bullied.”
“When I get a good grade, say, 90, I really want to
show my exam paper to my parents.”
Such attitudes were confirmed by their parents. One parent
told us that:
“The kid usually talks about something happy.”
Some students, however, indeed opened up to their parents
about the issues they had. One student said:
“I want to tell him [father] that I was disciplined by my
teacher today, and also scolded by grandpa.”
“There is no common language with them (parents).”
This phenomenon that these Chinese children resist deep
communication with their parents seems similar to findings
from other research on western children [13, 16]. In
addition to the generation gap, we believe that the physical
distance between left-behind children and their migrant
parents may also lead to psychological distance that further
impedes the openness between children and parents.
Beyond Phone Calls: Doing Things Together
In our interviews, both children and parents expressed a
strong desire to be together physically. Children often
recalled what they had done previously with their parents
when they were home and hoped to do that again:
While these children may just want to seek comfort and
sympathy from their parents, parents sometimes overlooked
such needs. Some parents had a negative response to such
information:
“(He) will not talk about fun things, just arguments or
conflicts with teachers at school.”
In addition to exchanging information about events in
school and at home, some children, although a minority,
would discuss with their parents their deep emotions and
feelings, such as their desire for normal family life. One
student, both of whose parents were migrant workers, said
that in a phone conversation with his father, he told him:
“I feel very sad when my mother cannot take care of
me, (and feel even more upset) when I saw other
mothers with their own kids.”
Most children were too shy to say that they were eager to
communicate with their parents about their innermost
feelings and emotions in our interview, but when asked
with specific questions like “Would you like your parents to
know you miss them?” and “Would you like to know
whether your parents miss you?”, they all gave positive
answers. One explanation to this phenomenon, according to
Dalsgaard et al. [7], is that emotional bounding between
children and parents often goes beyond words.
However, some students seldom or never talked about inner
thoughts with parents. On the contrary, they would either
share their feeling with their guardians or hide their
emotions from others totally. Sometimes, parents did not
sense such reservations of their children, and thought their
children would share their emotions and feeling with them,
although in reality, it is not the case. One parent believed
that his child would talk with him about her inner thoughts:
“She would tell me about any thoughts like that.”
“My father took me fishing. We caught a lot of fish.”
“I made dumplings (with my parents). I feel very happy
even though they said my dumplings were ugly.”
For parents, they indicated that if they could be home, they
would help their children with their school work, play with
them, and do anything that could “benefit their growth,” as
one parent put it.
Certainly, children also knew that having their parents
around was more a dream than a reality. Thus, some of
them offered an idea to stay “closer” to their parents with
technology—playing games on mobile phones together
with distant parents. One child told us he would “love to
play [mobile] games with my father.” More than half of the
children had played various games (e.g., badminton, chess)
physically together with their parents, and they saw the
games on mobile phones as natural extensions of those
games.
However, migrant parents were not as enthusiastic about
mobile games as their children and did not play such games.
Also, it seems that from their point of view, such games
distract children from school work. The benefits of playing
games together with children for the enhancement of family
ties may not justify the perceived negative impact of these
games on their children’s education in the long run.
Many children indicated that although they preferred to do
things together with their parents, they would still love to
just be with their parents even if they would not be able to
play with them. This finding echoed the discoveries by
Dalsgaard et al. [7], Raffle et al. [24], and Follmeret et al.
[10]: being with their parents is the most important thing to
children.
Communication and Interactions between Left-behind
Children and Guardians
However, the child told us another story:
“I would only talk about those thoughts with my
grandpa and grandma.”
This kind of misunderstanding could be caused by several
reasons. First, the generation gap may contribute to the
unwillingness of children to share their inner thoughts with
parents. As one child said:
To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the life of
left-behind children, we also asked children how they
communicated and interacted with their guardians. Our data
shows that the majority of children, about 60%, would
discuss their studies, school life, and daily life with their
guardians regularly. However, the conversions were often
limited to day-to-day events, such as:
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“I talked about family expenses with grandpa when I
was free.”
“I talked about school with grandpa: we had a test
today or I made a mistake on a question.”
In terms of their deepest thoughts and emotions, most
children chose not to discuss with their guardians.
Sometimes, they even did not want express their emotions
at all. As one student said:
“My grandpa always asks me about school. I don’t
want to talk about fun things that happened in school.”
Of course, there are some exceptions. As we described
early, one student was closer to her guardians—her
grandparents—than to her parents, and would only share
her innermost thoughts with grandparents, not parents.
Although to what extend children wanted to share their
thoughts with their guardians varied, they all said that they
wanted to do things together with their guardians, such as
house work, farm work, and watching TV, and really
enjoyed such experiences. This may indicate that leftbehind children have a strong desire for family intimacy,
and love to be with and interact with people on whom they
can depend.
DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
Based on our findings, we identified some design
implications for long-distance communication between leftbehind children and their parents. The main communication
tool in China for left-behind children and their parents is
mobile phones. Our study shows that Chinese left-behind
children rarely have a computer at home, and school
computers, if there are any, are limited to educational
purposes only. Design suggestions such as video phones
and complicated experience-sharing tools are therefore
inapplicable, and so our focus was on designs for mobile
phones.
New designs should encourage children to initiate phone
calls to their parents. Our research indicates that several
factors may contribute to the lack of willingness by children
to take initiative on phone calls, such as superficial
conversation topics on school activities and academic
grades, and the feeling of alienation by children. We also
learned that children were eager to discuss interesting topics
such as the life in the cities where their parents are, showing
their school achievements with methods beyond phone
conversations, and playing mobile games with their parents.
These findings indicate that to encourage more
communication between left-behind children and migrant
parents, new designs should aim at uniting children and
parents through topics and content of common interest.
Following this direction, we believe that designs that can
support rich media sharing on simple feature phones will
benefit left-behind children and their migrant parents
greatly. Although many apps for smartphone users are
available for video and picture sharing, these apps are not
appropriate for left-behind children and their parents,
because 1) children and parents usually do not have
smartphones, and 2) rural areas often do not have the
infrastructures for data transmission required by these apps.
New designs should target low-end phones, consume as
little bandwidth as possible, and be easy to use by both
children and migrant workers.
Furthermore, new designs should also consider tools that
can recommend content for children and parents to share.
Such tools can examine content available in the phone (e.g.,
pictures) and then provide suggestions on what might be
interesting.
Mobile games that could offer educational benefits would
also be useful. Children love to play games with their
parents, but parents have concerns with the potential
negative impact of games. One way to narrow down this
gap of perception is to design educational games involving
both children and parents, such as collaborative jigsaw
puzzles, or team Sudoku. Again, these games should
consider the technology infrastructure in rural areas and the
usability on simple feature phones.
Our study shows that although children mostly avoid
negative things, parents really want to know anything about
their children’s study and life, positive or negative, and
even like to talk to the teachers and guardians of the
children. Thus, one way to deepen the communications
between children and parents is to build a system that
involves not only children and parents, but also teachers
and guardians. One possible design is to build a system that
allows the teachers, parents, and guardians to follow the
progress of a child’s schoolwork. This system can integrate
services on PCs and mobile devices and supports
synchronous and asynchronous communications among
involved parties.
When using this system, the four parties can decide what
information (e.g., exam grades, homework assignments,
etc.), should be shared; among whom (e.g., parents only,
parents and guardians, etc.); how frequently to share (e.g.,
once a day, once a week, etc.); and in what ways (e.g.,
email, short message, picture message, etc.). With this
system, parents will be more informed about their
children’s schoolwork. Having a fuller picture about their
children’s studies may promote greater communication,
further improving the relationship between parents and
children.
CONCLUSION
How to help the left-behind children of migrant workers in
China has drawn attention from government, media, and
academia. We conducted a multi-phased study and used
interviews and surveys to study phone-based
communications between these children and their parents.
Our study identified some communication needs of leftbehind children and some potential new designs that may
help to improve long-distance communication. To our
knowledge, our research is the first of its kind to examine
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February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, TX, USA
the behaviors of left-behind children in communicating
with their migrant parents in eastern countries.
We recognize some limitations of methods. First, our
survey sample size was small, making our findings less
conclusive. Second, the locations of our interviews, which
were the schools the children attended, may implicitly make
children provide biased answers that are more socially
acceptable. Furthermore, phone-based interviews with
parents made it difficult to capture certain subtle but
important information from parents.
In the future, based on our design implications, we will
explore new designs and implement multi-channel
platforms on mobile phones to help left-behind children
better connect with their migrant parents. With such designs,
we will also conduct long-term field studies on the
effectiveness of such technologies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research is supported by National Key Basic Research
and
Development
Program
of
China
(Award
2013CB329305), National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Award 61232013, 61170182 and 61100151), and
Nokia Research China.
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