Duration and Timing of Parental Out-migration and Early Childhood Development in China

A sizable number of children in low- and middle-income countries experience separation from their parents due to labor migration. While scholarship has examined parental migration effects during school years and adolescence, few studies have examined the effect of migration on developmental outcomes in early childhood, a critical period characterized by a high degree of developmental plasticity and sensitivity. In addition, almost all previous work has relied on cross-sectional data, treating migration-induced family living arrangements as a static, time-invariant measure. However, parental migration is often temporary and circular, exposing children to multiple transitions that vary in timing and duration. To address these two limitations in the literature, the present study follows a panel of more than 4,000 young children in the China Family Panel Survey from 2010 to 2018 and examines early childhood outcomes using a counterfactual causal-inference framework with time-varying exposure. My results show that the effect of parental migration on children's outcomes depends on whether one versus both parents migrated and at what child age the parental migration happened. Specifically, one-parent out-migration is less detrimental to child development than both-parent out-migration. Parental migration impacts specific developmental domains depending on children's sensitive periods of development, with early absence being most consequential for physical growth and later migration being most consequential for noncognitive skills. The study offers a causal framework to better understand migration as a time-varying process, contributes to family demography by theorizing parental migration as a unique source of family complexity, and deepens our understanding of the toll that parental absence takes on human capital.