Survey: over 4 million left-behind children never meet parents for a whole year

A child weeps as her parents didn't show up on time to meet her in Dongguan city of South China's Guangdong province on July 30, 2010. [Photo/Xinhua]

For the left-behind children surveyed by a non-profit organization named "On the Way to School", 7.7 percent have not got a chance to meet their parents within a year and 2.7 percent even did not have any contact with their parents for an entire year.

In 2013, the All-China Women Federation said that there were 61,025,500 left-behind children in China. According to the surveyed result listed above, there should be about 4,700,000 left-behind children who do not meet their parents within a year and 1,650,000 left-behind children who make no contacts with their parents for a whole year.

7,432 rural students from 14 provinces are involved in the survey on the psychological conditions of left-behind children.

For this organization, children are defined as left-behind children as long as one or both the parents leave their hometowns and go to other places to live. Thus, they discover that the ratio of left-behind children amounts to 38.8 percent among all those considered in the surveyed as a whole.