Hearing young children’s perspectives: Reflections on research into left-behind children’s lived experience in Chinese rural areas

Abstract

Children’s right to be heard is an issue raised in recent years in the Global North, which has also been acknowledged by Chinese researchers currently studying child development and education. However, Chinese researchers still often prefer the perspectives of adults in their research on young children, citing a lack of suitable methodologogy for collecting and interpreting young children’s voices. This article recognises the significance of including young children’s perspectives in research. It discusses how Western methodologies for listening to their perspectives, such as the Mosaic approach, can be adapted for use in Chinese socio-cultural contexts. By reflecting on the first author’s research on the lived experience of leftbehind young children in a Chinese rural area, the article explores the development and implementation of such a methodology. The research findings indicate that the Mosaic approach, alongside phenomenological interviews and other research tools, provided an effective approach that enabled achievement of the research aims. Flexibility and reciprocity in relationships were two key contributors to effectiveness of this approach to research in a Chinese context.

Introduction

The lack of representation of children’s perspectives in research is an issue raised in recent years in the Global North and beyond. A few Chinese researchers (e.g. Mu and Hu, 2016; Wei, 2017) have also acknowledged the importance of equal rights for children to represent themselves and be included as active participants who give their perspectives with their own voices in research. Seeking to address this issue, this article discusses the development and implementation of a methodology and mixed methods research design for gaining young Chinese children’s perspectives on their lived experience as ‘left-behind young children’. The methodology was aimed at exploring possibilities for research that would honour children’s right to express their perspectives about their experiences and represent themselves in research within Chinese cultural settings.

The article focuses on two critical aspects of methodology and design. Firstly, the development and effectiveness of the data generation approaches used for revealing children’s perspectives to the researcher is discussed. Secondly, the article outlines the challenges the researcher (first author) faced as an outsider, from another part of China, to the rural communities where this research was conducted and the chosen methodology’s advantages for responding to these challenges.

Children’s right to be heard

Children’s equal right to be heard – to be respected for who they are, express themselves, and be listened to (Reder et al., 2003; UNICEF, 1989) – was acknowledged by UNICEF (1989) as a right of young children. Researchers have long raised the issue that young children’s voices were often not included in research about them (Clark, 2011: 5–6). Researchers studying young children’s development and well-being mostly seek the perspective of significant adults in children’s lives, rather than those of children themselves, despite children being knowledgeable and active subjects in their lives (Clark, 2011: 5–6). The exclusion of young children’s voices is a barrier to equality for children, as it impedes their right to be heard and seen as capable humans (Reder et al., 2003; UNICEF 1989). Young children have their own ideas and understandings of themselves and their world. They are capable of conveying their thoughts and feelings to others, and sharing their perspectives of social culture and contexts, when appropriate communication methods are applied (O’Farrelly and Tatlow-Golden, 2022; Reder et al., 2003; Street, 2022).

To include children’s voices and perspectives in research, methodologies and tools have been developed that enable researchers to engage and communicate with children and elicit their responses using diverse modes of expression suited to children’s communication preferences and abilities. These methods allow children to speak for themselves as capable individuals (e.g. Barker, 2013; Clark, 2004). Like much research on young children in the Global North, Chinese contemporary research about left-behind young children has also lacked young children’s voices. Chinese researchers studying left-behind children have acknowledged that young children’s perspectives are difficult to explore and thus are rarely included in their research (e.g. Hu et al., 2014a, 2014b; Tao et al., 2014).

This claim is understandable when considering Chinese researchers’ preference for ‘scientific methods’ since the 1900s, following Global North researchers’ common use of empirical, standardised research methods such as observations, laboratory experiments, natural experiments and questionnaires for research on children. Chinese child development and education researchers’ preference for ‘scientific methods’ was led by Chen, an influential scholar, who had studied in the Global North in the early 1900s and was influenced by both western science and Chinese traditional values (Wang et al., 2016). Chinese researchers studying young children agreed that children’s personal factors influence their development but did not attempt to seek young children’s perspectives or suggest that children are capable of expressing valuable opinions on their lived experience (Du and Chen, 2020; Kang et al., 2021). In spite of the importance of listening to young children being recognised globally, many Chinese researchers still prefer methodologies that evaluate children’s development and lived experiences based on caregivers and researchers’ perspectives, using data collection tools such as questionnaires and stardardised assessments (Duan et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2014b; Kang et al., 2021).

Listening to children in Confucian China

Seeking to explore methods and approaches to listening to left-behind young children’s voices in Chinese research is a response to the global call for young children’s equal rights to be heard. It is also an art of trying to employ in studies the Chinese Confucian traditional value of listening to young children. In accordance with this value, children’s opinions and words were recorded as direct sources of knowledge. A famous example from ancient times is the story of Confucius and Tuo Xiang (‘项橐’), a 7-year-old village boy. Confucius asked Tuo why he did not play with other children and discovered Tuo’s wisdom through their conversation, thus gaining knowledge directly from the child. This is in keeping with Chinese Confucian idioms that support the inclusion of participants’ perspectives in studies, such as ‘不耻下问’ (be modest to consult one’s subordinates) and ‘有教无类’ (make no discriminations in teaching and consult individual’s characteristics so as to individualise teaching practices). Although there is no record of methodologies that suggested equal rights of children, it has been a moral and correct practice in Chinese traditional beliefs that people in authority, such as teachers and researchers, consult the opinions of people from every social class, capacity and age, including young children.

Prior to Chen adopting empirical methods in education and child development research, Chinese education and child development scholars did not conceptualise their study of the world as scientific work composed of hypotheses, theories, methodology and findings but instead favoured a holistic practice based on culture and philosophy (Chen, 2001). The experiences and history of humans at all ages are valued as resources to discuss and summarise knowledge and philosophies. Chinese scholars did not conceptualise or standardise this way of generating new knowledge because ‘术’ (methods and tools) were regarded as less important than the mind and spirit (thoughts and beliefs about time and space). In other words, Chinese scholars were flexible with tools and methods, using a way of exploring and generating knowledge that studies subjects in the system and their connections with the other subjects. The current research applied a research approach in alignment with this way of exploration, by studying children within their sociocultural environments and historical backgrounds, including their mind and spirit.

Although the equality of being heard for young children and the way of knowledge generation within subjects’ socio-cultual environment are still commonly known in China through the old sayings and stories, they have not been applied in research about left-behind children, including young children, because of the popularity of ‘scientific methods’ since their introduction from the Global North into China. The first author of this article developed a research methodology that answered the call for children’s equal rights to be heard and through a study of children in their socialcultural environment, in order to investigate the lived experiences of left-behind young children in a Chinese rural area. She did this using contemporary western qualitative research methods for researching with young children (e.g. Braun and Clarke, 2019; Clark, 2011; Morris et al., 2011).

Left-behind young children in China and research about them

The Chinese government began raising the issue of ‘rural left-behind children’ in 2004 (Wang et al., 2016) in response to news reports on injury incidence and violence, including sexual violence against, ‘left-behind children’ (Lu and Wu, 2018). Before 2016 when the Chinese government established a national official definition of left-behind children (The Social Affairs Department of Ministry of Civil Affairs of the PRC, 2016; Yao, 2016), the definition of left-behind children used by researchers was varied (Luo et al., 2009). According to this now established definition, ‘left-behind children’ refers to either children and juveniles under 16 years whose parents are both migrant workers working away from home, or who have one migrant worker parent working away from home and the other parent not capable of performing his/her guardianship duty (The State Council, 2016).

The literature on left-behind children in rural China has mainly focused on their problems and four ‘hot’ topics: interventions, deviant behaviours, mental health and family child-rearing strategies (Wang et al., 2016). These topics and the supposition that left-behind children were living in disadvantaged stituations and were problematic, are still common in recent Chinese research (e.g. Jiang et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019) and in research published in English about left-behind children (e.g. Ao and Briffett Aktaş, 2022; Huang et al., 2022). However, some researchers who began their studies with these negative suppositions, actually found netural or even positive outcomes in their conclusions. For example, some left-behind children have good social adaptation (Li et al., 2014) and there is less depression in left-behind children than in migrant children who move to cities with their parents (Guo et al., 2015). In the argument over whether being left-behind causes problems in children’s development, some researchers suggest that other environmental, interpersonal and intrapersonal factors, rather than being left-behind, can explain differences in developmental outcomes between left-behind children and children living with both parents (Lu et al., 2016; Luo et al., 2009; Zhou et al., 2015).

The evidence that factors other than being ‘left-behind’ might account for differences in developmental outcomes and wellbeing for some children led the first author to apply a bioecological model to structure her holistic exploration of left-behind young children’s lived experiences. Her aim was to elicit children’s perspectives and to understand the sociocultural contexts of the children’s lives in rural areas of China. The theoretical framework and objective of gaining holistic perspectives also led the first author to develop a mixed-method approach that presented a rounded picture of left-behind young children’s lived experiences from their perspective as well as studying the links between the children’s lived experience. For the purposes of this article, only the qualitative methods used to gain children’s perspectives of their lived experiences will be presented and discussed.

Applying the bioecological framework in Chinese culture

A theoretical framework that reflects and aligns with the Chinese culture, sociocultural context and historical background is required when exploring the lived experience of left-behind young children in rural China in a holistic way and is inclusive of the child’s perspectives. The first author’s research attempted to address this by employing a bioecological framework, which considered the importance of contextual factors and provided a systematic perspective on children’s development within their cultural context.

Contemporary understandings of human development recognise that factors within and around a person form systems that collectively shape their development (Lerner, 2007). From a bioecological systems theoretical perspective, human development is influenced by biogenetic factors of the self and environmental factors, including people, physical context, culture and time (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006; Lerner, 2007). Conversely, individual human development is also part of the system because the developing person and their characteristics influence inter-personal, ecological factors in a reciprocal interaction (Bronfenbrenner, 1994; Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006). The Progress-Person-Context-Time model (PPCT model) from bioecological theory (see Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006) provided a framework that systematically connected these components into a network centred around the child being studied.

In the first author’s research, the PPCT model framed the holistic structure to study each focal individual – four left-behind young children. The children’s perspectives were explored using the Mosaic approach (Clark, 2011) combining interviews, observations and a questionnaire that collected caregivers’ perspectives and sociocultural information as contextual factors. The use of these mixed methods and data sources align with the right of children to be listened to and the Chinese traditional value of listening to children within their socio-cultural settings.

Also, the bioecological theory provided a framework for identifying, organising and understanding data within the children’s socio-cultural contexts. This allowed the first author to gather and analyse children’s verbal and non-verbal responses during naturalistic events in their home, preschool and village contexts, which were essential to achieving the research aims of exploring children’s lived experiences. The children’s perspectives on their lived experience were expressed in their own language, especially non-verbal language, such as pictures and drawings in the Mosaic approach (Clark, 2011). Further, when a researcher and readers are not familiar with the communities of participants prior to the research, building understanding of contextual and socialcultural factors is important for interpreting the lived experiences showed by the children (Lagunas, 2019). Together these data allowed for more informed interpretation of the children’s perspectives.

A mixed approaches and phenomenological design

The first author’s research, in acknowledging the significance of children’s rights to be heard, made children’s perspectives and interpretations the central focus when answering the phenomenological research question: ‘What are preschool-aged children’s perspectives on their lived experience as ‘left-behind children rainsed by grandparents’ (LBPC-GP) in rural China?’ This question required an approach that would allow the researcher to access and collect interpretations constructed by participants, chiefly the four young children. While the small number of the participants could not provide a generalisable picture for all left-behind children, it was valuable for digging deep into each case, allowing for varied, in-depth data collection over an extended period of time (Clark, 2011).

The research participants were one boy and three girls (aged 18–52 months at the first visit) and their families, living in neighbouring villages in a Province of northwest China, near the provincial capital. While these villages were not officially categorised as poor, the average annual income of residents was significantly lower than China’s average (Bureau of Statistics, 2019; Hou, 2019). The child participants lived with their grandparents while their parents worked in cities. Every child, with their grandparents and parents, was studied through two rounds of data collection – one at the beginning of a kindergarten semester and one at the beginning of the next semester. This allowed investigation into any daily life changes affecting the children’s lived experience at two different time points, such as separations and reunions with parents, seasonal activities and holidays.

Data collection tools

To respect children’s right to be heard, to be flexible and responsive to the daily lives of the children and families and to respond respectfully to the unique situation of using mostly Western methods to research a phenomenon of Chinese childhoods and communities, the choices of data collection approaches and tools needed careful consideration. Below we outline the methods that were adapted or developed by the researcher to achieve the aims of the research.

Hearing children’s voices: The Mosaic Approach

The Mosaic Approach was an important aspect of the research design. As children develop within a systematic network of interactions among multiple factors (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006), the Mosaic Approach, an explorative method that investigates both personal and contextual elements, was appropriate for studying the lived experience. It provided a ‘framework of listening’, applying ‘multi-methods that were ‘participatory’, ‘reflexive’ and ‘adaptable’ for children (Clark, 2011: 7). This was ideal for regarding children as active participants in the research, capable of reflecting, interpreting and illustrating connected components and episodes (Clark, 2005). The Mosaic Approach incorporates multiple activities – such as observation, child interviewing, photography, book-making, tours and map making – that enable children to express themselves in their preferred manner and serve as processes for both ‘speaking’ and ‘listening’ (Clark, 2005). Children are thus empowered to voice their opinions and be listened to (UNICEF, 1989).

To explore the lived experience of left-behind young children, the study focused on the relationships and interactions between children, caregivers and parents. Interviews, photography and room tours, mapping and role play, described below, were the tools children could use to express themselves, enabling the researcher to capture their perspectives of their lived experience. The researcher had an initial conversation with each child to learn their name, age and favourites games, toys, food and so on, as a warm-up and relationship building step when they first met. In the first round of data collection, the researcher also introduced the tools to each child before starting the activities. She listened to the children during the activities, recorded the processes with their permission and collected any materials produced, such as photos, videos and pictures.

The children in the research expressed their opinions on their family relationships through the family picture they drew as part of the mapping task. They also shared their daily activities in detail through the stories they created in the role play task. When they introduced their home to the researcher as part of the photography and tour task, they expressed their opinions on the daily routines and family relationships as they took the researcher on a tour of their house.

The specific tasks developed for this research are described below.

Photography and tour

Children are interested in cameras, through which they enjoy ‘speaking’ with creativity and visual language (Clark, 2011). Each child used a smartphone camera to record a room tour of their daily routine. The researcher walked around with the child, asking questions about their daily activities and objects in the rooms, such as getting up with grandparents, having meals with grandparents, taking a walk with them, playing by themselves or with other children or collecting toys. The researcher’s questions during the tour encouraged the child to share their activities, feelings, perceptions and interactions with their grandparents and parents. Children were invited to independently take photos and videos to show the objects, persons and scenes. Some preferred that the researcher helped them take photos, which were accepted as the approach was accommodating for this. The room tours were video recorded, and the children’s introductions and explanations were written down. Further photographs and videos were taken by the children or the researcher to capture daily events. The researcher planned to revisit the photos and videos with the children, however none of the children showed an interest in retelling stories of their daily activities. Thus the researcher organised photographs and videos chronologically along with the transcriptions of the room tours and field notes. This was different from the photography task suggested by Clark (2011), but was an adaptation needed to make the task more attractive to the young Chinese children in this study.

Mapping

In the original work of Clark (2011), mapping meant to make a map of the place. In the first author’s study, relationships between the child and other related people were mapped by the child, as a way of representing their lived experience. Two types were used: the genogram (Barker, 2013: 75–78) and bull’s eye hierarchical mapping (Antonucci, 1986; Rowe and Carnelley, 2005). The genogram creates a family network by asking the child questions about family members and their opinions on events and relationships (Barker, 2013: 75–83). It then links family members into a network, using different symbols to represent family members and adding notes and connecting lines to show their relationships and important personal information (see Barker, 2013: 75–78). The bull’s eye hierarchical mapping provides a three-circle diagram, which centres the individual and invites them to put important people in their life into the inner, middle or outer circle, in order from most to least significant (Antonucci, 1986).

For the bull’s eye hierarchical mapping, children were given a large piece of paper, coloured pens and pictures of all family members, prepared beforehand with grandparents’ help. The researcher asked the child to name everyone, and introduced the three-circle ‘map’. She then invited the child to place the pictures on the map in the order they preferred and encouraged the child to draw lines and decorations to make a family network, all the while talking with the child and asking questions about their family. Children were asked to explain their choices of order and decorations. When the child mentioned other people in the community, the researcher added them by choosing figures to represent them with the child or taking pictures of them at the time. The whole process was audio recorded.

Role play

The children were provided with toys or dolls to represent a child, parents and grandparents to create stories about themselves, their parents and grandparents. The children were invited to tell a story of ‘hanging out’ with family members or any other people they liked. The story they were invited to tell was adapted according to the children’s daily activities and the environment of the villages learned from gatekeepers. They were asked about who they would like to hang out with, why they choose those people and what they would do together. The role play was recorded.

Understanding children’s voice: Other approaches

Other research tools employed in the research included interviews, questionnaires and naturalistic observations. Parents and grandparents were invited to provide their points of view through phenomenological interviews as background to the stories told by the children. For these interviews, the researcher designed questions about social support and working life, personal characteristics of the adult and the child, everyday behaviours and activities, such as daily routines, parent-child separation and family and community cultural norms. Parents’ and grandparents’ responses provided descriptions and interpretations of their perceptions of the children’s lived experiences and background information for understanding the children’s responses.

A questionnaire and naturalistic observations (video-recorded) of free-play with peers and mealtimes with grandparents provided further data about child-grandparent interaction, child-peer interaction and relationships. Through grandparents’ responses to the questionnaire, open-ended questions in the interviews and social interactions recorded in the naturalistic observations, an understanding of the children’s sociocultural context provided background information for the children’s perspective, which helped the researcher interpret this perspective (Street, 2022). For example, when the child insisted on ‘writing’ her grandfather’s name in the mapping task, although she was drawing lines the researcher understood that the child was being taught to write and that she enjoyed it, because her grandmother had mentioned that she taught her grandchild ‘writing’ in her interview.

Employing the tools in Chinese context: A responsive approach to fieldwork

The research methods and fieldwork procedures were planned to anticipate adaptations that might be needed to address ‘culture gaps’ between western approaches and the research sites. As an outsider from a large city in China’s south, the researcher encountered challenges and opportunities created by the local culture. Local ways of meeting new people and getting along with friends and neighbours brought both advantages and disadvantages. Challenges also arose because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused unpredicted changes in local policies and sometimes limited entry into schools and communities. Two main characteristics of the study that helped the researcher respond to such challenges were the flexibility of the research methods and the reciprocity of relationships that were part of the local culture. These helped her build relationships with participants and obtain valuable background information from them and their communities. These two characteristics are discussed in the following section.

Reciprocity in relationships

In anthropology research, reciprocity between researchers and participants is an important characteristic of relationships (von Vacano, 2019). In the villages visited by researcher, reciprocity culture was a significant part of relationship building.

Reciprocity in the local culture means that in order to build relationships and nurture trust between people, it is important to give small gifts to show courtesy and kindness, and to accept small gifts, snacks and fruit to show your respect and reciprocal involvement. Observing the ways of greeting and being polite for initial visits to the participant families, the researcher brought with her stickers or candy for children or a bag of local fruit for the family. For subsequent visits, as she was accepted as an acquaintance of the family, she brought stickers for the children as a greeting. In a reciprocal gesture of politeness and acceptance, the participants gave the researcher a bag of their home-grown fruit. For the remaining visits, families shared home-made food, snacks and fruit with the researcher and gave her fruit or home-made food to take back to her living place, showing that she was accepted as a family friend by treating her like their neighbours.

As an acknowledged characteristic of the fieldwork relationship, reciprocity between researchers and participants involves more than giving and receiving physical objects (von Vacano, 2019). Trust and respect were elements of reciprocity that emerged in the study, both of which were important in building a research relationship. This was significant, given that the researcher was an urban young woman employing western research methods to work with people in rural villages in China.

Reciprocity culture was also evident in the unexpected but valuable help the researcher received from grandparents and teachers during the fieldwork. Teachers shared information about the local culture and gave practical advice on relationship-building, which helped the researcher get along well in village life during the fieldwork. Grandparents acted as a translator for children when they spoke dialects or when the researcher used words that were not familiar to the child. They were also ready to help and explain when the child mentioned things that the researcher did not know about.

One example of ‘giving back’ in the reciprocity relationship (Siegl, 2019: 91) was the opportunity for the children to practice their language skills, especially Mandarin Chinese, with the researcher. Some learned new words from their conversations with her during the Mosaic Approach tasks. They learned how to use sticky tape and expanded their vocabulary, learning words such as the names of toys and colours. Mostly, grandparents would be with the child while they were doing the tasks. The grandparents would sometimes join in and at the same time learn new ways to communicate with the child and new activities from observing while the researcher did the activities with the child. For example, one grandmother began to use a higher pitched, gentler tone to speak to her grandson after she was present in the room during our tasks, to help translate the boy’s words into their dialect. Some grandparents chose to not join in during research tasks with the children, but would take the time while the child was occupied to do household chores or chat with neighbours.

Reciprocity also allowed the researcher to gain valuable insight into the children’s lived experiences through stories and information shared incidentally by the participants during her visits. This was the participants ‘giving’ to show friendship, in ‘the expectation of reciprocity’ and in response to the friendliness and perceived trustworthiness of the researcher (Siegl, 2019: 91). Because of the participation of the grandparents, the researcher was able to collect data on the contextual backgrounds from their grandparents, as well as on the children’s perspectives through the Mosaic Approach activities. This mixed-method design made it possible to collect information through social interactions to supplement the data gathered using pre-planned methods and tools. Thus children’s daily lives could be understood through multiple perspectives.

Flexibility

Researchers working with non-western or rural communities often encounter ‘culture gaps’ – differences in language, habitation, customs and daily activities – that can result in the researcher, as an outsider, enounter unanticipated situations. Open-mindedness and flexibility to adapt to such situations are thus needed (Cao, 2019; Lagunas, 2019; McCarthy, 2021). In the study, flexibility allowed adaptations for west-east and urban-rural ‘culture gaps’, such as differences of living environments, habbits and customs, children’s different ages, changing family schedules and other unanticipated changes in the children’s lives.

The researcher encountered a number of unanticipated situations whilst collecting data. She found that some parents returned to the village regularly when they thought their children needed them, thus some children were not always living just with grandparents. Some preschool teachers left the area, in search of new lives and higher salaries in the city. Children under three did not attend childcare centres and thus preschool and teacher data could not be obtained. The unanticipated circumstances led to some participant loss or data gaps, necessitating flexibility to make changes to the data collection protocols so that sufficient data could be gathered.

Participants’ busy and changeable schedules presented further challenges during fieldwork. While participants always welcomed the researcher’s visit, they had often arranged other events at the same time. The researcher noted these situations as part of the participants’ lived experience, and thus novel issues to explore. As the researcher lived in the villages during data collection periods, she learned a lot about the daily life of the village through observation and chatting with participants and village people. She learned that, in the local culture, people had busy schedules and always did more than one thing at a time. It was common for people to visit each other whenever they had free time and villagers welcomed each other to join in their activities when they visited. The research participants did not mind the researcher being present when visitors came and the visitors did not mind being left to watch while their host was busy doing other things, such as being interviewed by the researcher. The visitors would share gossip and news with people in the house, including with the researcher.

It seemed that in the local culture, when a family let you enter their house and take a seat, it meant they accepted and trusted you. Thus they would not wait for you to leave before doing other things, nor would they ask visitors to leave when they wished to do something else. They just did what they needed or wanted to do. Sometimes the researcher did her own work or chatted with other people in the house while waiting for the research participant to come back home, just as the visiting neighbours did. The participants were not surprised or awkward when they returned and would simply resume the research activities – an interview conversation or a questionnaire or activities with the child. The flexible research design allowed the author to change the arrangements and research tasks before or during visits to respond to the changeable schedules and creative mind of children, recording these as resources for understanding the children’s lived experience. The Mosaic approach methods also allowed flexibility if children were not interesting in doing the activities as the researcher had planned. These responses still gave valuable data to the study.

Unexpected differences in the children’s life situations also necessitated flexible thinking by the researcher. Media coverage and research about left-behind children suggest that they seldom see their parents and thus rely more on grandparents and teachers (Ren, 2018). However, the researcher learnt through interviews and conversations with locals that many parents visited their children regularly and some took their children with them to their working cities during holidays. Some parents returned to their village for a long time if they left their job and could not quickly find a new one, and some simply took a rest to be with their child. Some parents would return to live with their children for years when they thought it necessary for their children. During the second fieldwork visit, a mother of a 3-year old boy returned home when he started preschool and a mother of a 4-year old girl, whose grandmother claimed herself as illiterate, returned home when the preschool began to teach literacy. Overall parents of the child participants were with the children more often than expected.

Flexilibity to adapt to teacher changes was also needed throughout the research. It was very common for preschool teachers to leave to seek new jobs in the cities or as a result of significant life events. The head of the preschool in one fieldwork village suggested that low salaries in the village schools meant they could not ensure long-term commitments from teachers, especially young teachers. For example, the teacher of a 4-year old girl participant, the only child who had a teacher during the first round visits, quit her job to work in the city before the second round visits.

Another significant unanticipated situation for the researcher that necessitated flexibility was adults’ concerns with the label ‘left-behind children’. They showed negative attitudes whenever it was mentioned and were relieved after learning that the researcher did not accept stereotyped negative notions of ‘left-behind children’, but was there to learn about children’s daily life with their grandparents. Hearing the term ‘left-behind children’, the grandmother of a boy who did not participate became impatient, suggesting that they were ‘all good’ and did not need help and refused to listen to the researcher. The father of a girl participant also hesitated when he heard ‘left-behind children’ and asked for further explanation of the researcher’s position before giving consent. The researcher intentionally chose not to use the term ‘left-behind children’ if grandparents or parents responded negatively, wishing to show respect to the family’s way of caring for their children and the reciprocity culture of the community. The researcher regarded parents’ perspectives as more important than pre-planned research methods, or stereotyped perspectives from previous research and media. Once they understood her non-judgemental and curious approach, participants appeared to trust the researcher and support the aims of her study.

Conclusion

The article has discussed the value of including the ‘voices’ and perspectives of young children in research about them, and has presented an approach used to explore young children’s perspectives on their lived experiences in a Chinese rural context. The article has suggested that the appropriate methodology for such an exploration needed to be respectful and responsive to different cultural and social contexts, and flexible in order to deal with unanticipated situations in an unfamiliar context. The example of such a methodology that was shared in the article showed that methodologies developed in the global North can be used to study an aspect of young children’s lives in a Chinese rural area. The research discussed used the Mosaic Approach to listen to children, combined with phenomenological interviews and other research tools that provided data on the participants’ socio-culural context. Together, these elements created an unique methodology for understanding children’s lived experiences through their own perspectives. This research showed that when used in a responsive way, with flexibility and reciprocity in the researchers’ relationships with participants, this methodological approach can be effective in a Chinese context.

During the study, the researcher/ first author learnt a great deal from the participants, not only about the children’s lived experiences, but also about their family lives and community cultures. Perhaps most importantly of all, she learned a lot about being a field researcher as a visitor to an unfamiliar setting. The rich data gathered and meaningful insights gained into the lives of this group of left-behind children show the researcher’s skills both in research design and in building positive relationships and trust with her participants. Through child-friendly research tools, flexibility and the culture of reciprocity in relationships, the researcher was given the gift of rich data and was able to give back to participants in return. Her research methodology, developed from western paradigms but imbued with Chinese values, contributes valuable new knowledge about young left-behind children to the existing literature. The study, and this article, offer insight into doing research with young children in China and provide a practical example that may encourage more Chinese researchers to research with children as active participants in, challenging the dominance of adult-centric, ‘scientific’ methods in contemporary Chinese childhood studies.