Mobilising left-behind children: contradictions and disjuncture of transnational parenting among emigrant women from the northern Philippines

de los Reyes, Elizer Jay and Yue, Audrey (2021) Mobilising left-behind children: contradictions and disjuncture of transnational parenting among emigrant women from the northern Philippines. CONTESTED ASIAN PARENTING IN INTRA-ASIA MIGRATION, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. 16 Nov 2021 - 17 May 2023 .

Abstract

Mobility-centric migration scholarship tends to assume that subscription to the ‘mobility imperative’, processes that mandate mobility, is the default course of action taken by rural young people when imagining their futures. While these claims may be valid, there is a need to attend to specificities of class, place, and temporality especially among migrant women in elementary occupation and their left-behind children who do not respond affirmatively to the mobility imperative.

In this paper, we examine relations of Filipina domestic workers (FDWs) and their left-behind children (LBCs) in the Cordillera Mountains, northern Philippines through a combination of multi-sited and digital ethnographies. We use transcripts, notes, social media posts and participants’ art from two periods: in 2017 involving LBCs of FDWs in Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Nicosia; and in 2021 involving LBCs and FDWs in Singapore (n = 10 FDWs; 10- LBCs).

We sum up our findings about migrant mothers-left behind children relations as a set of contradictory and disjunct relations by offering two conceptual handles namely: infantile mobilism and mobilised infantilism. By infantile mobilism, we refer to the disciplining of children and the salvific motives of emigration that render the voice of children as secondary to adults. This is invoked by mothers in the metaphor ‘para kanya da’ (it is for them). In contrast, we refer to mobilised infantilism as a case of tapping into the energies and youthfulness of left-behind children to facilitate and maintain gendered mobilities, and fill in the gaps caused by transnational migration. In the northern Philippines, this figures in the engagement of left-behind children in risky informal work such as mining, and their affective labour from toxic domestic affairs and their mothers’ absence. As a result of these contradictions, left-behind children prefiguratively refuse the mobility imperative. Instead, they insist on imagining a future in their villages by using their education for local employment or entrepreneurship.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Elizer Jay de los Reyes

Download statistics