Abstract
Left-behind youth in rural China refer to those children who remain immobile in rural regions after one or both parents migrate to an urban area for work. Prior research has consistently shown that those youth are vulnerable in terms of emotional and behavioral adjustment, relatively little is known about whether early left-behind experience poses a risk for late life development, such as prosocial behavior. Moreover, scant attention has been paid to the potential protective factors for facilitating their prosocial behavior over time. To fill these gaps, the present research contains two studies: in Study 1 (a cross-sectional design; N = 2384, 51.1% girls, Mage = 19.80, age ranged from 18 to 25 years), we compared prosocial behavior between emerging adults with left-behind experience (EA-LB) and their non-left-behind counterparts; in Study 2 (a two-wave longitudinal design; N = 388, 55.7% girls, Mage = 19.71, age ranged from 18 to 24 years, at Wave 1), we, adopting a sub-sample of Study 1, examined the direct and interactive effects of parental autonomy support, mindfulness, and gender on prosocial behavior in EA-LB. The findings from Study 1 showed that EA-LB reported lower levels of prosocial behavior than their non-left-behind counterparts. Furthermore, the results from Study 2 exhibited that, for males with lower levels of parental autonomy support, higher levels of mindfulness were associated with higher levels of prosocial behavior, whereas, for females with lower levels of parental autonomy support, mindfulness did not make a significant difference regarding prosocial behavior; accordingly, for males with higher levels of parental autonomy support, mindfulness did not make a significant difference concerning prosocial behavior, whereas, for females with higher levels of parental autonomy support, higher levels of mindfulness were associated with higher levels of prosocial behavior. The current study suggests that early left-behind experience in rural China presents an unfavorable condition for prosocial behavior in emerging adulthood. Moreover, parental autonomy support and mindfulness are critical protective factors for promoting prosocial behavior in EA-LB, and these effects should be differentiated by an individual’s gender.