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Left‐behind children refer to those rural children who are under 18 years of age and are left at home when both or one of their parents migrate to urban area for work. Recent findings showed that left‐behind children were disadvantaged by developmental, emotional and social problems.

A sample of 1165 rural children and adolescents were recruited to examine the characteristics of left‐behind children and explore the differences in psychological adjustment (including satisfaction, loneliness and happiness) by patterns of parental migration (i.e. no parent migrating, one parent migrating or two parents migrating) and the level of parent–child communication in rural China.

(1) Compared with children with one parent migrating, children with two parents migrating were separated from their parents at younger ages, for longer periods, and saw their migrant parents less frequently. (2 …