Unpacking the Relationship between Parental Migration and Child well-Being: Evidence from Moldova and Georgia

Abstract

Using household survey data collected between September 2011 and December 2012 from Moldova and Georgia, this paper measures and compares the multidimensional well-being of children with and without parents abroad. While a growing body of literature has addressed the effects of migration for children ‘left behind’, relatively few studies have empirically analysed if and to what extent migration implies different well-being outcomes for children, and fewer still have conducted comparisons across countries. To compare the outcomes of children in current- and non-migrant households, this paper defines a multidimensional well-being index comprised of six dimensions of wellness: education, physical health, housing conditions, protection, communication access, and emotional health. This paper challenges conventional wisdom that parental migration is harmful for child well-being: while in Moldova migration does not appear to correspond to any positive or negative well-being outcomes, in Georgia migration was linked to higher probabilities of children attaining well-being in the domains of communication access, housing, and combined well-being index. The different relationship between migration and child well-being in Moldova and Georgia likely reflects different migration trajectories, mobility patterns, and levels of maturity of each migration stream.

Parent Emigration, Physical Health and Related Risk and Preventive Factors of Children Left Behind: A Systematic Review of Literature

“…Our study findings show that having a migrant mother might be more harmful, than having a migrant father [6,19,33]. Some authors emphasize the negative influence of a culture, for example, traditions of physical punishments in some countries, such as Moldova and Georgia [50]. However, most of the outcomes stay negative and significant after controlling for potential socioeconomic cofounders (Table 2).…”

Effects of International Labour Migration on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Left-Behind Children: A Systematic Literature Review

“…We identified 20 descriptive studies that included children of non-migrant parents as control groups [3,4,8,13,24,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Two studies used longitudinal data [7,41].…”

“…In some studies, authors used scales such as the Social Anxiety and Loneliness Scale [21], Anger Expression Scale for Children (AESC) [32], Parent-Child Relationship Schema Scale (PCRSS), Social Anxiety Disorder Dimensional Scale (SADDS) [39] and Multi-dimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) [40]. Other tools included multi-dimensional well-being indexes consisting of the following six domains: education, physical and emotional health, housing, protection and communication access [4]. Some authors calculated a household wealth index to determine the socio-economic status of transnational households [27].…”

“…Worldwide, 272 million people were classified as international migrants with the largest proportions coming from Asia (41%) and Europe (23.7%) [1,2]. Parental labour migration is a common phenomenon in South and South East Asian, African and Eastern European countries, causing many children to be left behind [3][4][5]. For example, 27% of all children in the Philippines are considered to be left-behind [6], 37% in Ghana [7], 36% in Moldova and 39% in Georgia [8].…”

Migration and multidimensional well-being in Ethiopia: investigating the role of migrants destinations

“…Notes 1. Other papers utilizing this approach include: Vanore, Siegel, Gassmann, & Waidler, 2017;Gassmann, Siegel, Vanore and Waidler, 2018;Waidler, Vanore, Gassmann, & Siegel, 2017a,b 2. Income per adult equivalence is used over income per capita to take into account the economies of scale in consumption when household members share certain goods and that children usually have lower needs than adults.…”