Children of Migrant Workers

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They were also the victims of crime. The children abuse is a serious problem in China, especially for the left-behind children. A survey in Hunan reports that in many poor areas, 46.8 percent of left-behind children were injured for a long time, and most of cases could be avoided if they living with their parents.

For the left-behind children education, the major goal of their parents hard working is to make enough money to finance their children's education. The left-behind children are more likely to stay in school than other student in the countryside. However, the little help and care from their parent is negative for their study. And the goal of many children is making much money and live with their parents, so they prefer to drop school and become the new migrant workers generation.

The situation of the rural children live in urban is also not optimistic. Even it’s really hard, it still has more and more migrant workers like to moving with them to some big cities rather than leaving them in the poor hometown. Although these migrant children have lived in city for a long time, they still be treated as outsiders. Besides that, rural hukou families working in the cities are given unfair access to social, education and medical welfare benefits. Most of families can’t afford healthcare fee, that means that many children could only go to hospital in dire emergencies, that is often too late. Moreover, many hospital charge migrant workers additional fees to do some unnecessary expensive treatment. So that many migrant children are unhealthy, but their parent refused to take them visit the doctor and hope they can be cured by themselves. That is totally negative to the children’s health.

It also has institutionalized discrimination and highly restricted access to local schools for the migrant children education. A study of the China National Institute for Educational Research shows that migrant children are more easily to drop out school and more difficult to access to school and graduation. If a migrant children want to study in city, the family should provide many complex documents and many school would charge them additional fees to access to school. In order to reduce the number of migrant children, many big cities governments, such as Beijing, Shanghai, try to find many kinds of reasons to prevent migrant children enroll. Moreover, their parents cannot able to pay too much for their education. A survey in mid-2000s indicated that the education fees were making up 20 percent of total family income. So in most time, many of them are in the danger of dropout. Even if migrant children could get into local school, the other students were not known them as integral members. They could not take part in some activities and couldn’t be as a member of Young Pioneers. They were treated as inferior and lacked the confidence. Besides that, many parents don’t want their children to go to school. They want them find a job to support the family as soon as possible.

Part 4: Future scenarios and their implications for China and the World

In the future, it may have two different scenarios about the children of migrant workers issue. First one, migrant workers may back to their hometown in the future and live with their children. It's positive to the China’s countryside development and also good for the left-behind children growth. Besides that, it could reduce the population pressure in some big cities. The second scenario is the migrant workers will increase in the future. The issues about these children couldn’t be solved in a short time, if the number of migrant workers still increase, these issues will be more serious in the future. So in my opinion, the ideal one is the first one.

Part 5: Works Cited (MLA format)

- "Migrant Workers and Their Children." 23 June 2013. Web. 14 May 2015. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/migrant-workers-and-their-children

- "The Children of Migrant Workers in China." China Labour Bulletin. 8 May 2009. Web.

- Chen, Zhengxin, and Jiayu Guan. "夜间飙车砍人居然为练胆." 广州日报. 30 Apr. 2015. Web.