How Parental Internal Migration within China Affects the Aspirations of Left-Behind and Migrant Children: From Comparative and Multidimensional Perspectives

The author explores how parents' internal migration within China affects their children's socioeconomic aspirations and extends previous research by (1) comparing left-behind and migrant children, (2) considering multidimensional aspirations, and (3) testing mechanisms that explain the effects of parents' migration on their children's aspirational pathways. The first finding is that left-behind and migrant children have higher migratory aspirations than rural children. However, left-behind and migrant children do not differ from rural children in terms of occupational aspirations. The multidimensional perspective revealed that migrant children do not want mid-status or high-status occupations in smaller cities; rather, they prefer traditional rural-to-urban labor migration pathways, working in low-status occupations in big cities. Finally, the findings verified that most of the hypothesized mechanisms cannot explain the effects of parental migration. The persistence of the effects of parental migration on migrant children suggests that institutional mechanisms may exist to explain the effects.