Children’s well-being in diverse migration contexts: Goals, design and preliminary findings from the FAMELO project. Jennifer E. Glick, Victor Agadjanian, Natalie D. Eggum-Wilkens Dirgha Ghimire, Sarah Hayford, Carlos Santos, Scott Yabiku Abstract: Migration is an increasingly prevalent demographic behavior that has important consequences for families and communities around the world. Families and households play a central role in shaping migration decisions; in turn, migrants can produce important economic returns to the households from which they originate. Both migration decisions and eventual remittances have important implications for children’s development and future opportunities. Yet, we know comparatively little about the dynamic role migration may play in children’s lives. A core challenge in understanding commonalities and differences in the way family migration context is linked to children’s development is the difficulty in comparing associations across studies that use different definitions of migration and different conceptualizations of children’s development. The Family Migration Context and Early Life Outcomes (FAMELO) project begins to fill these gaps by conducting comparable longitudinal surveys of children and their caregivers in households with and without migrants in three traditional sending areas: Jalisco, Mexico; Gaza, Mozambique; and Chitwan, Nepal. This paper describes the conceptual framework, preliminary field work and initial analyses of pilot data collected for the FAMELO project. Introduction: Migration is an increasingly prevalent demographic behavior that has important consequences for families and communities around the world. Families and households play a central role in shaping migration decisions. In turn, migrants can produce significant economic returns to the households from which they originate. Both migration decisions and eventual remittances have consequences for left-behind children’s development and future opportunities. Yet, we know comparatively little about the dynamic role migration may play in children’s lives in origin communities. To better understand the cumulative and intergenerational impacts of migration, research must go beyond a focus on the economic determinants and outcomes of migration to consider the ways familial migration itself alters children’s options, aspirations and subsequent pathways to adulthood. Of course, the impacts of migration on families and children left behind are most likely not universal. The diversity of family structures, motivations for migration, and human and social capital embedded in migrant households along with the gender, religious, and ethnic stratification of their
origin societies may all play important roles in how children fare when migration occurs. But findings from existing studies are remarkably mixed with some reporting that migration enhances children’s well-being and others reporting worse outcomes among children of migrants (Cebotari & Mazzucato, 2016; Creighton & Park, 2010; Hu, 2012; Jordan & Graham, 2012; Lee, 2011; Van Hook et al., 2012; Vogel & Korinek, 2012). Further, much of our understanding of children’s developmental trajectories are based in countries and communities with higher levels of infrastructure and development with far less attention to contexts with fewer resources and more constraints for children’s development (Bornstein et al., 2012). This paper reports on a new project just underway to compare these impacts among children in three very diverse contexts of migration: Jalisco, Mexico; Gaza Province, Mozambique and Chitwan District, Nepal. This new project is focused on addressing unanswered questions about migration’s influence on left-behind children’s social competence and adjustment problems, aspirations and plans, and the key transitions children make as they move into adolescence and early adulthood. This paper relies on existing data and new pilot data to demonstrate variations in children’s schooling and activities as well as caregivers’ views of parenting and socio-emotional development among families engaged in migration and those without current migration from their households. These preliminary analyses have helped set the stage for the full “Family Migration and Early Life Outcomes” (FSMELO) study that is now underway in three focal settings. This paper first reports on the motivations for FAMELO and describes our focal settings. The paper then turns to results of preliminary analyses and pilot work. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons learned and a description of the full data collection activities now underway. Motivating FAMELO: Role of Migration on Children’s Well-Being. Existing studies of migration’s impacts on families and households report very mixed findings for returns to children with some studies reporting that migration enhances children’s well-being and others reporting worse outcomes among children of migrants. These mixed findings are likely domain dependent. Theoretically, there are reasons to 1
expect positive outcomes for children in migrant-sending households and families on some measures. Much of the early research on children in migrant-sending communities focused on the economic returns to households that send migrants with the expectation that migrant remittances can improve children’s access to resources. Indeed, research has generally accepted that positive economic returns to households tend to benefit children left behind in terms of improved nutrition or access to schooling More recently, research has pointed to both non-economic benefits and costs for migrant- sending households that may yield less positive results for children. Migrants and migrant networks can transmit information, values and ideas that can alter the expected timing of transitions throughout the life course (Levitt, 1998). These ‘social remittances’ will likely influence children’s own orientations towards education, family formation and their own migration. Migration changes social norms, roles and expectations in participating households (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007). These changing orientations may encourage higher aspirations for education or, alternatively, may reduce educational commitment and encourage children to become migrants themselves (Kandel & Kao, 2001; McKenzie & Rapoport, 2011). Children may also experience negative outcomes. For example, children may be called upon to substitute for missing migrants’ labor and have less time to engage in schooling potentially negating the economic gains that make schooling more affordable. Parental absence or stress within migrant households could reduce child well-being and discourage children’s aspirations (Jordan & Graham, 2012). In short, the psychological and human capital investment consequences of migration can mean worse outcomes for children left behind. Part of the difficulty determining the extent to which migration yields positive or negative outcomes for left-behind children stems from the lack of comparative data and measures. We may expect some similar relationships of migration and outcomes across settings. For example, socioeconomic gradients in child development appear across a variety of settings (Paxson & Schady, 2010). Thus, household assets and home environments may mediate the relationships between migration and outcomes in similar ways, regardless of the setting (Vogel & Korinek, 2012). There is also variation such that not all children may similarly benefit depending on age, gender and other 2
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