Nie Mao: Only all-round efforts can help the kids

Families, educational institutions, grassroots organizations and governments at all levels have to join hands to help the children left behind in the countryside by their migrant worker parents.

Because of the lack of parental care, many left-behind children have met with accidents. They have suffered burns, have been injured in road accidents, electrocuted, or fallen seriously ill or drowned.

Left-behind children are also often targeted by criminals. Many of them are abused, threatened, blackmailed, beaten up or even kidnapped and sold.

The authorities need to make protection of the left-behind children part of their agenda, which should include severe punishments for people who commit crimes against them. The authorities should also improve laws related to under-age children, especially left-behind rural children, including strict laws on protection of minors, compulsory education and crimes against children.

The media, for its part, should increase their coverage on left-behind children to help Chinese people reach a consensus that they are an issue not only for rural areas, but for the entire country.

The left-behind children's parents, guardians, schools, teachers and grassroots organizations, too, should take concerted actions to deal with the issue.

As the ones who should be most responsible for their children, parents who have left (or leave) the countryside to work in cities should seriously think about their offspring's life in their absence and make proper arrangements for them.

Since guardians, teachers and grassroots organizations are responsible for guiding and caring for the left-behind children, they have to play the parents' role as well. Guardians shoulder almost all responsibilities of the parents during the children's pre-school period and, hence, should love and take care of them as if they were their children.

Teachers are responsible for the children's education, so they should be given added incentives to do their job in the most professional manner and take care of the children's emotional health.

And local officials should create the basic social environment that can help the left-behind rural children grow up in the most healthy and creative atmosphere.

This is to say that there should be an integrated social environment combining the familial, educational and social environments for the left-behind children in the countryside to make up for the absence of their parents.

Schools, too, have an important role to play: they should optimize the educational structure, reform education concepts and maximize the use of the limited education resources available to them. Plus, the government should create a better community culture in rural areas and focus on protecting and supervising the left-behind children.

Aside from parents, guardians, teachers and grassroots organizations, urban social organizations can also play a supporting role in solving the problem. They can either employ farm workers or seek the help of related associations and volunteers to come to aid of the left-behind children.

And let us not forget that if society endeavors to help the left-behind children grow up into healthy human beings, both physically and intellectually, they will repay the debt with interest in the future.

The author is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts, Central South University.