It is an obvious fact that non-left-behind children in rural areas live with their parents, including * * * eating New Year's Eve, * * playing temple fairs and games, watching TV and surfing the Internet at home, * * * doing farm work and housework, and carrying out emotional communication and parenting through parent-child conversation, which is structurally lacking in the families of left-behind children. Fortunately, in the families of left-behind children, the structural deficiency caused by the division of time and space can be compensated and replaced by the psychological construction of parents' position in children's hearts.

Although there are parents' positions in the parent-child relationship of every left-behind children's family, there are obvious differences in strength. According to research, in family life and family education, emotional communication between parents and children, children's attachment to parents and understanding of * * * should run through the whole process and all-round parent-child relationship. In addition, the following factors can significantly enhance the psychological parental status of left-behind children and promote their positive growth.

First, parents should spend as much time with their children as possible to improve the quality of parent-child communication. Parents who go out to work have great mental and life pressure, and the time constraint of family education is a prominent problem. The explanatory framework of parental rule tells us that it is a necessary condition and foundation for parents to make time to communicate with their children. As close as possible parent-child contact, emotional input, positive (not negative response), long-term and continuous parent-child interaction can produce, maintain and enhance the sense of attachment and family cohesion between parents and children, and form an environment for children's healthy development. Parents of left-behind children spend little time with their children at home. They need to cherish the time they spend with their children after returning to China, and they need to make use of the limited time of regular and irregular telephone communication to carry out uninterrupted emotional communication. When family conditions such as economy allow, leaving one parent, especially the mother, to accompany the child at home is conducive to the growth of the child. This is also the common practice of "father goes out to earn money and mother stays at home" in the historical process of urbanization in western developed countries.

Second, parents' positive attitude towards life, serious attitude towards things and sense of responsibility have a significant role in promoting their parents' status, thus providing positive motivation and role models for their children's growth. Research shows that it is very important for parents to balance going out to work and accompanying their children. If they let their children work hard, there will be many positive results as their children grow up, such as showing good self-esteem, better academic performance and more positive family and peer relations. Parents who go out to work pay attention to constantly improving their own quality and learning new knowledge, showing that they can see problems with new knowledge and eyes, which can also significantly enhance their image in the eyes of their children.

Third, authoritative parenting can improve the quality of working parents and promote the better growth of left-behind children. The research shows that the authoritative parenting style of "warm care+guidance and control+moderate behavior and educational expectation of achievement" is not only the most effective family parenting style across cultural differences, but also the social class. It is the most effective for parents of left-behind children to adopt this mode of parenting principle and implement family education, which is also more conducive to enhancing parent-child relationship and improving the quality of working parents.

Fourth, do a good job in the entrustment of child support and maintain good communication with the school. From the perspective of parents, children's learning in school can be understood as extending their companionship to children's growth and entrusting the responsibility of children's growth agents to schools. Home-school communication and cooperation is the daily primary task for parents to choose and provide social experience outside the family for their children, and it is also one of the key links of complementary parenting resources inside and outside the family. Parents of left-behind children pay attention to keep in touch with schools and teachers, find out their children's personality characteristics, growth advantages and growth problems in time, and interact with schools and teachers to promote the growth of left-behind children more effectively than schools and families find and solve problems alone. Parents' good performance in front of classmates and teachers in the process of providing services for the school will also help to enhance the image of parents in the eyes of children and stimulate their self-motivation.

At the beginning of the research on the problem of left-behind children in China, it was found that all kinds of negative problems of left-behind children were actually related to the degree and change of parents' status. Our preliminary observation shows that the reasons why some left-behind children feel less about their parents' position are not only the emotional personality factors of parents and children, but also the family class and poverty characteristics. Most of the left-behind children with weak parents come from poor families, and their parents (especially their mothers) feel helpless and even desperate about life. In extreme cases, they abandon their families and children, which leads to the dilution or even dissolution of their parents' experience. The external performance is that children give up on themselves. Parents with low educational level and low ability to perform parental duties will greatly reduce their image in the eyes of left-behind children. In this sense, the negative problems borne by left-behind children are not simply the division of family time and space, but the psychological and behavioral conflicts between parents and between parents and left-behind children caused by the entanglement between family time and space division and class and poverty characteristics, which leads to the weakening of parents' sense of place and has a negative impact on the growth of left-behind children. This also reminds us that it is an inevitable extension of the research logic to discuss the parental status of left-behind children at the level of social class and poverty.

It should be emphasized that with the rapid change of society, the family structure is also changing. The phenomenon that parents are in office can be observed not only among left-behind children, but also among children living with their parents in cities. It exists not only in the lower class families, but also in the middle class and various professional families. For example, families of military personnel, families of engineers and technicians whose working place changes with the change of construction site for a long time, families of parents working in different places, flight attendants, flight attendants' families and so on. Left-behind family has become a family form that can not be ignored in China's population and social transition period. It is also a realistic need to study the status and role of parents in the family structure of "separation and cohabitation" on a larger scale.

(Author: Qi Wunian, researcher of Guangdong Education Research Institute)