Children Left Behind
If there is nothing new about transnational families (a study of immigrants to the United States in 1910, for example, found that 50% of men had left a child in their home country (cited in Dreby 2010, p.
5)), the extent of and increasing propensity for mothers to migrate to care for their children is a significant new development. Although there is no gender breakdown of transnational parents from the Philippines, the fact that at least 70% of newly hired Filipino migrant workers from 2000 to 2006 were women, suggests the prevalence of transnational mothering (Parrenas 2010, p. 1827). Of the more than 11 million Mexicans living and working in the United States, 38% offathers and 15% ofmothershave left children living inMexico (Dreby 2010, p. 6). Parents almost without exception frame their migration decision in terms of bettering their children’s lives, and remittances sent home pay for children’s schooling - sometimes in private schools, and family members’ medical and other expenses. In many cases, these remittances are essential rather than supplemental to household livelihood. In the Philippines, for instance, it is estimated that between 34% and 53% of the population depends on remittances for their daily subsistence (Parrenas 2010).In line with Arvin’s experience reported above, Filipino children tend to be separated from their parents, and in particular their mothers, for long periods of time. Rhacel Parrenas (2005a) calculated that overseas migrant mothers from the Philippines spent an average of 23.9 weeks with their children over the course of an average of 11.42 years away, while migrant fathers spent 74 weeks with their children over 13.79 years. Because of the high cost of airfare from many of the countries in which these mothers work, fear of losing their job (in the case of Filipina migrants, typically working as domestic or other type of care worker), and responsibility to send remittances home, many migrant mothers come home only every 3-4 years for an extended visit of a month or two so (Parrenas 2001; Pratt 2012).
In the past, Mexican transnational parents in the United States have been able to visit their children much more frequently, but with the militarization of the US-Mexican border, the scarcity of legal pathways to permanent residency for undocumented residents, the expense and danger of crossing the border (especially for children and women) and new employment opportunities located further away from the border in the Midwest and Northeastern US, prolonged family separation increasingly has become the norm within Mexican transnational families as well (Dreby 2010). In her “domestic ethnography” of Mexican transnational families divided between New Jersey and Oaxaca Mexico, Joanna Dreby states that “one of the most devastating consequences of parents’ decision to migrate without their children” is the fact that separation is almost always longer than anticipated (2010, p. 31). Ofthe 45 Mexican parents that she interviewed in New Jersey between 2003 and 2006, mothers averaged 3.5 years away from their children and fathers 8.3 (2010, p. 206).The absence of a mother is felt to be and often is much more disruptive than that of a migrant father. In a survey of 302 school-aged Filipino children, 82.8% indicated that they would advise their friends to “allow your parents to work abroad.” However, the breakdown of responses with respect to migrating fathers as compared to mothers was telling: 59.5% would advise friends to allow their fathers to go abroad, 19.7% would advise both parents, and only 3.6% would advise friends’ to allow their mothers to work abroad (Paz Cruz 1987, cited in Parrenas (2001)). Children left by their fathers are typically cared by their mothers, and their nuclear family remains more or less intact. When a mother leaves, the nuclear family is likely to be disrupted. Children left by mothers tend to be cared for by their female extended kin, often a maternal grandmother or aunt (Asis et al. 2004; Dreby 2010; Parrenas 2005a; Pratt 2012). Of the 30 children of migrant mothers interviewed by Parrenas in the Philippines between 2000 and 2002, only four were cared for by their fathers and in some cases their father, who remained in the Philippines, moved to another location within the country while his wife was working overseas.
Siblings in larger families are sometimes separated if responsibility for their care needs to be distributed across female kin (Pratt 2012). While most children are not significantly neglected, Dreby (2010) found that children left in Oaxaca often were not supported by their caregivers to achieve their parents’ high expectations for scholarly achievement, because grandmothers were growing old and many were illiterate. When Parrenas (2005) interviewed female guardians in the Philippines, most cried during the interview as they expressed their feelings of being overextended, as grandmothers who felt too old to take on the responsibility of caring for their grandchildren or as aunts with families of their own. She notes that most extended kin are not altruistic and they view the work of caring for children left behind by migrant mothers to be a burden, which - given cultural expectations in the Philippines, they have no choice but to take on.While - unlike Arvin - most children of migrant parents enjoy more prosperity because of the remittances sent home and most migrant mothers make great efforts to care for their children from afar through frequent telephone calls and - more recently, text messaging (Fresnoza-Flot 2009; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Madianou and Miller 2010, 2011; Parrenas 2001), many children left by mothers (less so fathers) tend to feel neglected, even abandoned. In her study of transnational migrant families in the Philippines, Parrenas reports that, “Again and again children describe the nurturing provided by migrant mothers as ‘not enough’” (2005b, p. 33). While many recognize their mother’s sacrifice for their relative material prosperity, they are not convinced that it is worth her absence.
Parrenas’s interviews were conducted between 2000 and 2002, before communication technologies such as text messaging became more widespread. By 2006, the Philippines was dubbed the text capital of the world, with approximately 42.8 million mobile phone subscribers in a population of 88.5 (Madianou and Miller
2011).
Mobile phones and text messaging allow mothers living abroad to manage their households in the Philippines on a daily basis and to maintain constant communication within a large network of extended kin and friends. However, these forms of communication are not the same as the touch, smell, and sensuality of daily proximate contact and specialists classify text messaging as “phatic” communication, a type of communication in which the act of communication rather than its content confirms the relationship (Madianou and Miller 2011). Consider the case of one domestic worker living in Vancouver Canada who left two of her children in her sister’s care (another lived with her mother), made careful financial arrangements to ensure their wellbeing, text messaged with her children frequently, and spoke with them weekly on the phone. It was not until she visited the Philippines and was able to speak with her children face-to-face that she discovered that her sister had taken for herself much of the money that the domestic worker had sent home, her children were sometimes hungry, they slept on mattresses in the living room, and did not receive the gifts that she sent on special occasions (Pratt 2013). An extreme case, it nonetheless points to the limits of these forms of communication. Madianou and Miller (2011) also note a marked discrepancy between Filipino children and their mothers in feelings about mobile phones and text messaging, with children more ambivalent about the capacity these technologies afford for maintaining satisfying relations with their mothers. The researchers reason that this reflects in part asymmetrical access to the use of this technology: seven times the number of calls come into the Philippines as go out, likely reflecting the higher cost of initiating a phone call from the Philippines.Mothers’ visits home are, as noted above, sporadic and these too can be difficult. Some Filipino mothers and their children reunited in Vancouver recalled actual non-recognition at the beginning of these visits: “She didn’t even recognise me.
She walked past me and then I said, Mama. It’s me;” “It’s funny or sad because when I got home, my kids could not even recognize me;” “[I waved at my four year old, who] kind of just looked at me, like ‘Okay, who are you?’” (Pratt 2012, pp. 55-56). Children described the stress of these visits: “the hardest part [of the separation] is when she comes home and leaves again. It is very distressing for us... We would be scared. We usually tried to avoid her in the first week” (Pratt 2012, p. 59; see also Dreby (2010) for visits home by Mexican mothers; Schmalzbauer (2004) for visits home by Honduran mothers).The emotional impact of family separation manifests to varying extents in different ways for children of different ages (Castaneda and Buck 2011; Suarez- Orozco et al. 2011). Dreby (2010) distinguishes between younger children, who tend to manifest their resentment towards their parent as indifference, and adolescents, who often act out towards their caregivers and other authorities, and fail to deliver on their side of the “intergenerational contract” with their migrant parents by doing poorly in school, even dropping out (see also Lahaie et al. 2009). In the case of the Philippines, there is some evidence that children of migrant mothers fare less well in school; analysis of a large representative sample of 10-12-year-olds found that a lower proportion of children with mothers working abroad were on the honor roll as compared to children whose fathers work overseas and children of nonmigrant parents (Scalabrini Migration Center 2003-2004). Dreby isolates four reasons for these difficulties in school in the community in which she has worked in Oaxaca: depression, misbehavior associated with defiance of authority, lack of support from caregivers (in a school system in Oaxaca that expects high levels of parental involvement), and peer shaming. She found that even in a community in which emigration is the norm, “children’s individual experiences are not typically supported by their peer groups,” and children with parents who have migrated feel shamed by other children for their “nonnormative” family arrangements (2010, p.
214).Despite making a strong argument for the emotional impact of family separation, Dreby (2010) is careful to argue for the resilience of Mexicantransnational families, claiming that the relations between family members in some sense intensify during the separation as each enters into (with varying commitment and success) their respective roles and obligations within the “migration contract”: for parents to send remittances and children to achieve success in school. The hardship of separation does not, she argues, destroy family bonds between migrant parents and their children, and children’s resentment tends to fall away as they move beyond 13 years.
It is also worth considering that dynamics beyond the family may account for the poor educational outcomes noted by Dreby in Oaxaca and that the production of the children of migrant workers as poor students may be a wider (if unintended) community project. Drawing from her ethnography of a town in which there are high levels of out migration to the United States, Susan Meyers (2014) argues that children of migrants in rural Mexico are excluded from social membership by school policy and practices even before they leave Mexico. Teachers expressed disapproval of out-migrants for depleting Mexico of human capital and cultural unity (by returning with US goods and values) and they consider migrants to be shirking their civic responsibility by leaving. Meyers argues that students in rural Mexico are effectively tracked by educators, either for ongoing education in Mexico or for migration to the United States, and those who seem likely to migrate receive less attention at school. Teachers thus unwittingly construct children of migrant parents as “nonmembers” of Mexican society. Even before they migrate, she argues, these students are constructed as undocumented migrants.
Parrenas also qualifies her analysis of the impact of family separation on Filipino families. She does not dispute that children genuinely feel abandoned by their mothers working abroad, especially in (the majority of) families in which the father does not assume caregiving responsibility, and that these perceptions of abandonment have serious personal and social effects. She is however concerned that her assessment of the impacts of family separation not further vilify migrant mothers. As Dreby also notes, “Migrant mothers bear the moral burdens of transnational parenting” (2010, p. 204) and in the Philippines the abandonment discourse is widespread and highly gendered. In 1995, as one example, President Fidel Ramos publicly called for initiatives to keep migrant mothers at home. “We are not against overseas employment of Filipino women,” he said. “We are against overseas employment at the cost of family solidarity” (quoted in Parrenas 2010, p. 1836), That is, he identified the problem to be the migration of mothers rather than the migration of women per se. Parrenas argues that children’s inability to recognize their mothers’ transnational care and the care provided by extended female kin, and their feelings of abandonment and longing for greater intimacy with their mothers working abroad are instilled by the norms of patriarchal gender relations in the heteronormative family, promulgated in the media and literally taught in the state-regulated Values Formation curriculum at school (Parrenas 2010). She calls for an expansion of the ideology ofmothering to include economic provisioning as a respected maternal role, as well as a recalibration of the gender division of the labor of social reproduction, such that fathers assume a greater caregiving role.
There are more far-reaching hesitations about negative conclusions about the fates of children in transnational families. Karen Fog Olwig (1999) argues in relation to Caribbean children whose parents work overseas that the impact of separation very much depends on the health of the extended family network and - crucially - whether their parents maintain a strong economic and social presence through remittances and periodic visits. She found that the children who felt like second- class citizens were those whose mothers had stopped sending remittances. In the Caribbean family, she argues, social and economic relations are not concentrated within the nuclear family and so it is impossible to assess the wellbeing of children without assessing a wider web of kinship relations.
So too, in a critical engagement with Parrenas' analysis, Filomeno Aguilar presents evidence from Batangas Province in the Philippines to demonstrate “that kin other than the absent parent can be effective in extending emotional care to migrants' children, who grow up without the disappointments expressed by Parrenas's informants” (Aguilar 2013, p. 347). In his view, Parrenas imposes a western frame of the nuclear family on a non-western context. He lays particular emphasis on the importance of siblingship within the extended Filipino family (Aguilar 2013). “Unlike middle-class opinion makers based in Metro Manila,” the people in the village in which Aguilar conducted his ethnography “refrain from passing judgement on transnational families and their growing children, especially adolescents, saying a lot depends on the individual child” (2013, p. 352). So too he argues that there is no stigma attached to being a child of migrant parents, “as may be the case elsewhere” (2013, p. 352). Also writing in relation to rural Philippines, Deirdre McKay (2007) cautions that criticisms of family separation and transnational parenting potentially betray Eurocentric and middle-class norms of family and intimacy. In a rich ethnographic account of one family in Ifugao, she argues that in this region of the Philippines there is nothing particularly new or damaging about parents leaving their children in the care of kin. She also disrupts a purely economistic reading of remittances, arguing that remittances, gifts, and daily text messages can thicken rather than diminish intimate relations between kin and can be an important medium through which intimacy is performed and experienced.
As Olwig (2007) notes in relation to the Caribbean family, the family is not a static social entity and different family forms and ways of relating are emerging within new migratory frameworks, mediated by new communication technologies. The family is a complex social site, sometimes of competing narratives and forms. In the Caribbean context, Olwig argues, the family as an extensive open-ended network of extended kin relations that share resources coexists with the “folk” model of the nuclear patriarchal family. So too “the” Filipino family might in some regions of the Philippines be a sedimentation of very different precolonial and colonial, religious, and other legacies. Nonetheless it seems possible to suggest that the emotional consequences of slippages or contradictions between different narratives and modes of relating are likely most deeply felt by the least powerful and most vulnerable in the family, namely, children. There is sufficient research from enough different places to suggest that family separation can cause stress for the children who are left behind if the extended kin network is not robust enough to fill the gap left by migrant parents.
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