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Abstract It is a universal phenomenon that parents work or do business away from their hometowns while leaving their children back in their hometown. As the most populous country in the world, China has the largest number of left-behind children. The estimated number in 2010 is 61 million in rural China. Previous studies have showed that being left-behind by parents would lead to the problems related to emotion, mentality, behavior, education, health, and so on. But these studies usually focused on the current or short-term influences of left-behind experience. Very few of them explored the long-term consequences of left-behind experience during childhood. Based on the survey data of 2，385 post-1980s migrant workers working in 19 cities of Yangtze Delta and Pearl River Delta, the present study aims to explore the long-term consequences of left-behind experience during childhood by analyzing the effects of emotional compensation, intergenerational compensation, and intergenerational transmission. Indicators used are whether these post-1980s migrant workers are currently living with their parents, or living with their children, and whether they are leaving their first child back in their hometown. Based on the psychological mechanism of ″unrealized wishes″ of Gestalt psychology, this paper proposes the first hypothesis that those who have had their own left-behind childhood experiences would have higher intention to live together with their own parents. Based on the phenomenon of intergenerational compensation, we put forward the second hypothesis that migrant workers with left-behind experience during their childhood would be less willing to leave their first child back in their home town. Based on the phenomenon of intergenerational transmission proposed by social learning theory, our third hypothesis is that those who have had such left-behind experiences during their childhood would be less likely to live together with their children. Several dual logistic models were constructed by using the statistical software SPSS 19.0. The results showed that the left-behind experience during one's childhood has significant influences on migrant workers in their decision of whether they would live together with their parents. The results indicate that the number of those with left-behind experience living together with their parents is 2.09-2.85 times that of those without such left-behind experience. Further analysis showed that the effects are contingent to the different life stages of their left-behind experience. The largest significant impact on the left-behind experience appears in the primary school stage, followed by the middle school stage, and then the pre-school stage. Yet, the left-behind experience has no significant influence on whether or not migrant workers live with their own children. The study also did a ″robustness check″ by using Bootstrap Method or applying alternative variables, which has verified the stability of the above findings that the left-behind experience during one's childhood will result in a remarkable effect of emotional compensation, but such experience will not cause the effect of intergenerational compensation, nor the effect of intergenerational transmission. The phenomenon that migrant workers who had left-behind experience during their childhood tend to live together with their parents can probably be explained by Gestalt psychology. Because of the absence of parent-child interactions and family care during their childhood, these migrant workers tend to live together with parents in their adulthood if possible. In this way they could realize their ″unrealized wishes″ to a certain extent and make up for their psychological regret formed in their childhood, which is similar to the ″compensation effect″ or the ″compensation phenomenon″ of biology. In addition, according to general psychological theory, if the emotional compensation is not sufficient, migrant workers with left-behind experience during their childhood would try to compensate it by intensifying their parent-child interactions with their children. Thus, relatively fewer of them would leave their children back in their hometown and relatively more of them would probably live together with their children to achieve their whole Gestalt. But these hypotheses are not supported in the present study. There are two kinds of possibilities. One is that the left-behind experience actually has no such effect. Another possibility is that the effect of intergenerational compensation and the effect of intergenerational transmission are mutually offsetting in this case. To verify the latter, we need further research by using more suitable instrumental variables.
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