When Luo Dahong, a migrant worker in Zhouji village, Central China's Anhui province, returned home recently, he was puzzled by the reality and asked himself, "Where are the children?"

The village, where nearly 70 percent of parents are migrant workers like Luo, used to be boisterous in summer holidays as children were busy playing together.

But now it's a quieter scene as many kids increasingly prefer to stay in corners, staring at their phones without saying a word or even ignoring people's greetings, China Youth Daily reported.

Luo feels quite helpless about his kid's "mobile phone addiction", a phenomenon silently eroding childhoods.

According to a survey conducted by volunteers from Yangzhou University in over 400 rural families in Guizhou, Anhui and north Jiangsu province, playing with mobile phones for long periods of time has become an epidemic among rural teenagers. "Parenting by phones" is increasingly common in mountainous areas, especially for left-behind children.

Some children are "eating, walking, and even sleeping with cell phones in their hands," said the report.

The data showed that nearly 42.7 percent of left-behind children ages 12 to 16 have their own mobile phones, with more than 77.3 percent regularly using them to surf on the internet.

In addition, in many areas, rural children spend even more time on the internet than urban children, especially left-behind children.

"More than 31 percent of left-behind children in some areas spend more than two hours on their mobile phones every day during the summer vacation, and nearly 15 percent spend more than four hours online. Some 48.3 percent of the left-behind children are highly reliant on phones," said Liu Siwen, director of the survey.

Then what are the reasons behind mobile phone addiction among left-behind children? Their phones are usually bought by migrant parents in a bid to facilitate communication and remote supervision. Therefore, "parenting by phones" is a helpless choice for many families.

But for some primary and middle school students in those families, mobile phones are more like electronic toys than useful tools.

"The vast majority of left-behind children are cared for by their grandparents, but the elderly are generally not able to use smartphones and cannot manage their grandchildren well. Yet they can save a lot of trouble by giving their grandchildren a cellphone," said Zhang Yu, principal for a primary school in Southwest China's Guizhou province.

The addiction to mobile phones leads to a number of problems. Zong Chunyan, a consultant at Yangzhou University's mental health center, said the overuse of mobiles can result in children having less effective communication with their parents and peers, as well as an unsociable personality.

Physically, staring at a mobile phone screen for a long period is likely to cause impaired vision, cervical spondylosis and other problems.

But in Zhang Yu's eyes, hidden risks such as the decline in academic performance, inattention and exposure to inappropriate information are even worse.

"I think effective cooperation between families and schools is the most useful tool to break children's dependence on cell phones," said Zhang.

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