Examines caregiver support's impact on resilience in left-behind children, indicating important family structure roles.
Prior research tends to treat left-behind children as homogeneous, overlooking variations in their family structures. Grounded in the Resilience and Youth Development Module, this study explores caregiver support among four distinct groups of left-behind children: children left behind by one (LBC-One) or two migrant parents (LBC-Two), children from divorced families left behind by the custodial parent (LBC-Divorced), and bereaved children left behind by their single living parent (LBC-Bereaved). Second, it examines the correlation between children’s resilience and caregiver support and, therefore, determines the mediating role of caregiver support in the relationship between family structure and resilience of rural left-behind children. Structural equation modeling analyses on a sample of 2,300 students ( M age = 13.93 ± 0.94 years) recruited from 4 junior schools reveal that LBC-One received significantly more caregiver support than the other three groups. In addition, caregiver support mediates the resilience disparities between left-behind children from different family structures.
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Jia et al. (2026) studied this question.
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