Department of Maternal, Child & Adolescent Health, School of Public Health, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui Province, China; Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Population Health & Aristogenics, Hefei, Anhui Province, China. Electronic address: [Email]
Given the ethical limitations of exposing children to experimentally manipulated adverse experiences, evidence of the effects of parent-child separation on subsequent psychopathology are based mostly on animal studies. Left-behind children phenomenon resulting from rural-urban mobility in China offers unique "natural experiments" to explore the long-term physical and mental health consequences of parent-child separation in childhood.
