‘Without your mum, something is missing': The children left behind by migrant parents

In the village of Salchia, in southern Moldova, 14-year-old Mihail misses his mother. At lunchtime and in the evenings, he calls her on Viber or WhatsApp. But it's not the same as having her at home.
'Without your mum, something is missing, right?' he says.
When Mihail was just a baby, both of his parents left the country to find work – a necessity in a poor rural region where opportunities are scarce. He was raised by his grandparents and aunts. Now that he's older, his parents take turns staying with him while the other works abroad. At present, his mother is employed on a farm in Italy.
'He's at a sensitive age now, so one of us is always at home with him. But if neither of us went abroad, it would be hard for us to make ends meet,' says Mihail's father, Leonid.
There are millions of children like Mihail around the world, kids whose parents leave their impoverished home regions in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, China or South America in search of work, higher wages and better prospects. Academics refer to them as 'children left behind'.
In Moldova, more than 20 per cent of all children are estimated to have at least one parent working abroad. In China, tens of millions of children are believed to have been left in the care of relatives in rural areas while their parents migrate to cities in search of jobs.
In the Philippines, one of the world's leading labour-exporting countries, nearly a quarter of children are growing up without one or both parents at home. In Indonesia, over 11 million of the country's 84 million children are thought to live in similar circumstances, while in Venezuela the figure stands at 800,000 out of a total child population of nine million.
It's a situation that was once common in Western Europe, particularly during the industrial revolution, when the migration of adults from rural areas to towns and cities – a pattern of development – took off.
Weighing up the pros and cons of parental labour migration for the children left behind is no simple task. In many cases, children in these families enjoy better material conditions than their peers. But a large body of research – much of it conducted in China – shows that they also seem to face significantly higher risks of anxiety, depression, and antisocial behaviour.
When 29-year-old Moldovan Ecaterina Grati was a child, her father left their home country to work abroad. By the time she was eight and her brother three, their mother had also gone, to Russia. The two siblings were left in the care of their grandmother.
'It was scary, being without both mum and dad,' she recalls. 'I felt very sorry for my little brother. He cried a lot when mum left. We tried to distract him, saying she'd be back soon, and so on. But overall, we both probably felt fear.'
Her childhood was tough. At the time, she couldn't understand why her parents had gone, but she now recognises they had no real choice. There were simply no other means of making a living and giving their children a decent life. 'For my parents, it's still a painful subject,' she says. 'Mum always cries when we talk about that time.'
Growing up, she more or less raised herself and took on a big share of responsibility for her little brother. But the hardship also brought strength. She developed a strong sense of initiative and independence, traits that have served her well in adult life. Today, at 29, she runs her own cleaning business. 'My childhood taught me that you have to rely on yourself,' she says.
The ability to take responsibility and act independently is a trait that sociologist Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri and her husband and colleague, social scientist Áron Telegdi-Csetri, have also observed in children left behind by migrating parents. The couple, based at the CASTLE Centre for the Study of Transnational Families at Romania's Babeș-Bolyai University, have studied children in Romania, Ukraine and Moldova.
'Many of them even tend to view children whose parents stay with them as spoiled,' says Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri. The children were often also understanding of why their parents had left. Áron Telegdi-Csetri recalls interviewing a Ukrainian teenager who was asked whether his parents had involved him in the decision to work abroad. 'There was nothing to discuss, not even for our parents. They had no choice,' he replied.
Because the phenomenon still carries a degree of structural stigma in parts of Eastern Europe, the researchers sometimes encountered what Áron describes as 'a peculiar reflex' among the children. 'I've noticed that they'll say other parents might have abandoned their children – but 'my parents didn't abandon me.' There's a strong impulse to defend them,' he says.
In the early years after her parents left, Ecaterina Grati could barely speak to them at all, a silence that only deepened her sense of abandonment. 'Phone calls to Russia were expensive, and this was before video calls became common,' she says.
Later, as communication technology improved, keeping in touch became easier. But even today, many parents can't afford mobile data for video calls in the first months after migrating, says Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri. Until they've earned their first pay cheques, contact with children back home can be sporadic at best. That's why the CASTLE project has proposed that local authorities provide emergency communication kits to transnational families. 'Because the first months of migration are the hardest,' says Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri.
China is believed to have the world's largest population of left-behind children – a result, in large part, of the hukou system, a household registration policy that restricts access to public services for rural migrants working in cities. As a consequence, many parents are forced to leave their children behind in home villages while they seek employment in urban areas.
Xiaojin Chen, a sociologist at Tulane University in the United States, has spent several years studying China's left-behind children. Unlike the Romanian researchers, he hasn't observed a trend toward greater independence and sense of responsibility among these children. Rather the opposite.
'A lot of times, the grandparents become very protective. They know that they have the responsibility to make sure the children are safe,' he says.
Many studies have highlighted negative psychological effects experienced by China's left-behind children, such as depression. But results vary and Xiaojin Chen argues that psychological well-being is difficult to measure. 'On average, compared with children who live with both parents, these children may be a little more isolated, and they're probably not as active as other kids,' he says.
Yet, he often observes that the social bonds with grandparents can, in many cases, almost entirely replace those with the parents, who may only see their children once or twice a year.
'In Western culture, we tend to assume that the emotional bond must come from the nuclear family. But in more traditional rural China, a strong emotional connection with grandparents can be enough. If that bond exists, the child should be fine,' says Xiaojin Chen.
From time to time, moral debates flare up in China, where migrant families are stereotyped as dysfunctional. Parents are cast as neglectful, their left-behind children traumatised and with grandparents ill-equipped to care for them. It became especially clear last spring, after three 13-year-olds in the Hebei Province murdered another 13-year-old whom they had bullied for a long time.
Both the victim and the perpetrators were children of migrant workers and had been left in the care of relatives.
Xiaojin Chen has not found any strong evidence that left-behind children are significantly more prone to criminal behaviour, although some studies suggest otherwise. What he has observed, however, is an increased risk for some of these children to become victims of bullying or sexual abuse, particularly when no strong guardian is present.
Overall, it is children who grow up with both parents absent and only a single grandparent – often elderly and frail – who are most at risk, Chen argues. 'That is a huge risk factor,' he says.
When Xiaojin Chen reflects on the long-term social consequences of millions of Chinese children growing up without their parents, he sees one threat in particular. What will happen to the intergenerational informal contract – the long-standing expectation in rural China that children will care for their parents in old age?
'The emotional connection between parents and the children left behind is very weak. Will they really take care of their migrant parents when they become older? We don't know that yet.'
In Moldova, Ecaterina Grati sees how children who, like her, grew up without their parents often end up following the same path. 'Most children in such families grow up believing that the only way to earn a decent living is by going abroad. They have no role models who've succeeded at home,' she says.
Even though she now understands why her parents made that choice, she could never bring herself to leave her six-year-old daughter behind to work in another country. 'I don't want my child to go through the same thing.'
But 14-year-old Mihail has already made up his mind. He plans to do exactly what his parents did when he's older. 'I will leave,' he says. 'There's nothing here. No jobs, no people. Everybody already left.'

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