Left behind, not alone: feeling, function and neurophysiological markers of self-expansion among left-behind children and not left-behind peers

Four in 10 young rural Chinese children are ‘left behind’ by parents migrating for economic opportunities. Left-behind children do as well academically and imagine as many possible futures for themselves as their peers, implying that they must compensate in some ways for loss of everyday contact with their parents. Three studies test and find support for the prediction that compensation entails self-expansion to include a caregiving grandmother rather than one’s mother in self-concept, as is typical in Chinese culture. We measured self-expansion with feeling, function and neurophysiological variables. Twelve-year-old middle school left-behind children (Study 1, N = 66) and 20-year-old formerly left-behind children (now in college, Studies 2 and 3, N = 162) felt closer to their grandmothers and not as close to their mothers as their peers. Self-expansion had functional consequence (spontaneous depth-of-processing) and left a neurophysiological trace (event-related potential, Study 3). Left-behind participants had enhanced recall for information incidentally connected to grandmothers (Studies 1 and 3, not Study 2). Our results provide important insights into how left-behind children cope with the loss of parental presence: they include their grandmother in their sense of self. Future studies are needed to test downstream consequences for emotional and motivational resilience.