Rachel Murphy has co-authored a new research paper in Child & Family Social Work, on Listening to Children’s Need to Matter in Skipped Generation Migrant Households. 

The paper explores the experiences of children who live in skipped generation households because of parental migration. It draws on matched interviews with 34 children and 20 grandparents from 19 skipped generation households in rural Hunan, central China, to examine what the children wanted significant adults to know about their care needs. It finds that the children emphasised reciprocal caregiving; the caregivers' interactions in listening to and accompanying them; and the caregivers' understanding and valuing of their study efforts beyond grades, each of which assumed special significance in a context of socio-economic challenges and long-term parental migration. Rachel and her collaborators Li Mi and Xiaoyan Huang reflect on the possibilities for translating these insights from our listening to the children into a social intervention to encourage reciprocal caregiver–child interactions that help children to feel that they ‘matter’.

 Here is the link to the article.