BackgroundHow to promote the health (especially mental health) growth of left-behind children has become a hot social issue. Physical exercise is usually considered as a positive role in improving the physical and mental health of children, which can be considered to be integrated into the living environment of left-behind children.ObjectiveTo discuss the changes of left-behind children in psychological health before and after the exercise-based intervention, thus providing a practical approach to improve the psychological growth of this disadvantaged group.MethodsAn exercise-based social intervention experiment was designed and conducted in a township middle school in China, and 200 left-behind children with relatively low psychological health participated in the experiment.ResultsPhysical exercise had positive effects on rural left-behind children’s sense of hope, self-esteem, self-efficiency, and self-concept, and it seems that the positive effects are durative due to the optimization of living environment. There was no significant difference in the psychological promotion effect of different programs (football and table tennis) on left-behind children. Hope, self-esteem, and self-efficiency significantly mediated the relationship between physical exercise and self-concept of left-behind children.ConclusionPhysical exercise contributes to promoting the development of rural left-behind children’s positive psychology such as hope, self-esteem, self-efficiency, and thus relieving the negative psychology caused by long-term parental-child separation and improving self-concept.

Background: Left-behind children are more inclined to generate psychological problems relative to non-leftbehind children, thus how to rehabilitate their health psychology and promote the psychological health development of this special disadvantaged group in healthcare settings should be paid more attention to. Objective: This paper attempts to present a social intervention approach and explore its impact on the rehabilitation of rural leftbehind children's psychological problems in healthcare settings. Methods: This study firstly designed a social intervention program based on the health psychology theory and the generation causes of left-behind children's psychological problems, and then three groups were applied to test the effectiveness of the program with comparison analysis. Results: Compared with the control left-behind children (group 2), the left-behind children in the experimental group 1 had positive changes in learning anxiety, physical symptoms, anxiety about people, loneliness tendency, self-blame tendency, allergy tendency, terror tendency and impulse tendency. And their mental health can be rehabilitated to the level of non-left-behind children in group 3. Conclusion: This study revealed positive effects of specially designed social intervention program on the rehabilitation of left-behind children's psychological problems in healthcare settings. The results have both theoretical and practical implications.