“I got up really early this morning to fix breakfast for my younger brother before he went to school,” wrote sixth grader Yang Haijiao in her diary recently. The government was distributing water on the side of the road, and she had to take the day off to collect it.
“The water has been gone completely in the past two days,” she wrote. “Grandma has been ill for days. I can’t expect her to get the water.”
Like many of estimated 85 million other “left behind children,” the young Guizhou Province student too often misses school to assume the responsibilities of an adult, while her parents live and work in a city far from home. This is the one of the prices of the Chinese regime’s economic growth model, which has brought astounding GDP statistics, but more than 30 years of fractured families and emotionally wounded children.
Struggling to support their families, millions of rural parents leave their villages to seek work in factories in the cities. Their children are left at home with their elderly grandparents, or other relatives, or even alone. The care of the children is often limited to basic living support and safety, while education, behavior, and psychological needs are often neglected.
