Fu, Yao, Jordan, Lucy P., Kim, Thida, and Graham, Elspeth (2024) Children's health and well-being in the context of parental migration: The case of Southeast Asia. In: Tatek Abebe,, Anandini Dar,, and Karen Wells,, (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK, pp. 196-220.

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the health and well-being of children who remain behind when one or both of their parents migrate. There is increasing emphasis on children affected by parental migration in the global literature, which reports diverse findings according to the specific circumstances involved. When parents move elsewhere for work, children either migrate along with their parent/s or stay behind in the origin community. The chapter reviews how parental migration has been found to impact children in low- and middle-income countries in Southeast Asia, a region that accounts for around 23.6 million international migrants worldwide. Temporary labor migration is the dominant type of migration in Southeast Asia, and labor migrants are more likely to move alone, less commonly with a spouse, and more rarely with children than their permanent migrant counterparts. The focus here is on the children of labor migrant workers who remain in origin communities, living in transnational families divided across borders, but the discussion will also consider children ‘left behind’ by parents who migrate within their own country. The term ‘left-behind children’ is commonly used in the literature to describe minors under age 181 who remain behind when at least one of their parents migrates for a period of not less than six months (Mazzucato & Schans, 2011; Wickramage et al., 2015). Despite large numbers of recorded labor migrants originating in Southeast Asia, precise data on the number of left-behind children across counties in the region is lacking. Nevertheless, available data suggests that the number of left-behind children is large. For example, 27% of minors in the Philippines have at least one parent working abroad (UNICEF, 2019), and at least 15 percent of Thai children are cared for by a grandparent due to parental migration (Knodel & Nguyen, 2015). In this chapter, we discuss key studies from the main migrant-sending countries in Southeast Asia to assess current knowledge of the impacts of parental labor migration on various indicators of left-behind children’s well-being. The discussion pays particular attention to how the forces of global development intersect with family’s migration practices influencing child development. These forces are particularly noticeable in the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) of Southeast Asia.

Item ID:	84237
Item Type:	Book Chapter (Research - B1)
ISSN:	9781003155843
Keywords:	Development Studies, Environment, Social Work, Urban Studies
Copyright Information:	© 2025 selection and editorial matter, Tatek Abebe, Anandini Dar and Karen Wells; individual chapters, the contributors
Date Deposited:	03 Dec 2024 02:54
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