The impact of students with left

The number of left-behind children in rural China has increased dramatically over the last decade. It is reported that about 21.88% of child population with an estimated number of 61？million are left-behind children whose parents leave them to work in cities. We conducted a cross-sectional study to explore the impacts of left-behind experience (LBE) on college students’ depression and other influencing factors. This study discusses the mediation effect of self-esteem together with psychological resilience on college students with depression and negative life events of left-behind. The study also discusses the regulation effect of LBE. A total of 788 college students were selected from three universities in Sichuan and Chongqing (367 with LBEs, 421 without LBEs). Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Check List (ASLEC), Self-Esteem Scale (SES), Resilience Scale of Chinese Adolescent (RSCA) and Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) were used to measure the negative life events, self-esteem, psychological resilience and depression, respectively. Bootstrap program was used to test the mediation effect, and multiple-group analysis was used to examine the regulation effect for LBE. Scores of ASLEC for the college students with LBEs were higher than those without LBEs (8.59？±？3.57) vs (7.06？±？3.38), p？<？.001). The scores of LBE, ASLEC and SDS were positively correlated with the college students with LBEs (r？=？.21 to .29, p？<？.01), while the scores of RSCA and SES were negatively correlated (r？=？？.30 to ？.59, p？<？.01). The mediation effect of college students’ self-esteem and psychological resilience between negative life events and depression was significant (mediating effect？=？.08, .13, .07; p？<？.01). Thus, the college students’ self-esteem and psychological resilience on negative life events had strong mediation effect on depression. The test of Bootstrap showed that the mediation effect of self-esteem and psychological resilience was significant (95% confidence interval (CI)？=？[0.04–0.76]). The LBE had regulation effect on college students’ self-esteem and psychological resilience. (The constraint model fitting degree of variation is Δχ2？=？2,120.68, Δdf？=？8, p？<？.001.) The self-esteem and psychological resilience of college students with LBEs can be used to mediate the relation between negative life events and depression, whereas those without LBEs cannot. Self-esteem and psychological resilience fully mediates college students’ negative life events and depression, which is regulated by their previous LBEs