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Several million children currently live in transnational families, yet little is known about impacts on their health. We investigated the psychological well-being of left-behind children in four Southeast Asian countries. Data were drawn from the CHAMPSEA study. Caregiver reports from the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) were used to examine differences among children under age 12 by the migration status of their household (N = 3,876). We found no general pattern across the four study countries: Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Multivariate models showed that children of migrant fathers in Indonesia and Thailand are more likely to have poor psychological well-being, compared to children in nonmigrant households. This finding was not replicated for the Philippines or Vietnam. The paper concludes by arguing for more contextualized understandings.
Key Words: Asian/Pacific Islander families, childhood/children, cross-national, immigration/migrant families, mental health/well-being.
Transnational migration from the global south is creating new family forms. Growing numbers of parents from low-income countries in Southeast Asia are joining the global movement of workers responding to labor shortages in wealthier countries of the region and beyond. As populations in more developed countries age and demand for service workers grows, an increasing proportion of these migrant parents are mothers who leave their families and children behind to take up "temporary" employment providing domestic and care services to distant others. A common feature of all such migrations is the creation of a transnational family where children are geographically separated from one or both parents over an extended period. It is likely that several million children in the region are currently growing up in the absence of their mother or father, or both, and there is an urgent need for a better understanding of the impacts of family separation on the health and well-being of children left behind. This paper focuses on the psychological well-being of children under 12 years of age in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam using a standardized instrument to measure psychological distress as reported by the child's principal caregiver. Psychological well-being is thus defined as the absence of indicators of psychological distress. The analysis used primary data collected for a reasonably large sample of children in each of the four study countries and is the first study in the...