The Impact Of Child Migration On The Mental Health Of Rural Parents

While life expectancy per capita is increasing,in recent years China’s low birth rate,low mortality rate and low natural growth rate demographic patterns are aggravating the problem of an ageing population,and against the background of a dual economic structure,a large number of rural children are migrating to work,resulting in spatial separation between parents and children.At the same time,data released by the World Health Organization in 2020 shows that nearly one billion people worldwide are affected by mental health,and the China Health Statistics Yearbook shows that more and more people have died of depression,anxiety and other mental illnesses in recent years,and suicide among the elderly is also common.In view of this,the mental health of rural parents deserves particular attention in the context of the increasingly serious hollowing out of the countryside and the lack of social pensions.This paper uses the 2SLS method to investigate the impact of children going out on the mental health of rural parents by constructing a composite index,the mental frailty index,to measure mental health using the 2013 CHARLS data.The results show that:(1)children going out has a significant negative impact on parents’mental health;(2)further heterogeneity analysis reveals that children going out has a greater negative impact on the mental health of elderly,female,and low-income parents,and on the mental status of parents from net outflow regions and parents with chronic co-morbidities have a stronger negative effect;(3)after considering the issue of reverse flow of financial support,a mechanism analysis found that net financial support has a significant positive effect on parental mental health,and that economic transfers from children away from home to parents are motivated by altruism rather than exchange;(4)by including inter-generational care-giving in the mechanism by which children’s absence from home affects parental health,the study showed that grandchildren compensate for the emotional absence and inter-generational care has a significant positive impact on parental mental health.