Raising the ‘good’ Filipino left-behind child: a spatiotemporal perspective

de los Reyes, Elizer Jay (2023) Raising the ‘good’ Filipino left-behind child: a spatiotemporal perspective. Living apart together: Growing up in Transnational Families, Unperfekthaus, Friedrich-Ebert-Straße 18-26, Essen, Germany. 27 - 29 Apr 2023.

Abstract

Left-behind children occupy an ambivalent role in the migration projects of Filipino transnational families. On the one hand, they are considered as the primary motivation of their parent/s’ departure (Asis, 2006; de los Reyes, 2020, 2019). On the other hand, their views about their family’s migration projects are held secondary (Lam & Yeoh, 2019; Martin, 2015) or sometimes ignored by adult decision-makers. However, when migration projects fail, left-behind children are tapped into as resource to keep the family afloat (de los Reyes, 2019, de los Reyes & Yue, forthcoming). This contradiction is what de los Reyes and Yue (forthcoming) call as infantile mobilism and mobilised infantilism which characterise the shifting nature of children’s agency in migration projects. What these conceptualisations suggest is that notions of childhood are continuously being adjusted (Langevang & Gough, 2009) by transnational families depending on the situation they find themselves into.
Drawing from this ambivalent role taken up by left-behind children within transnational families and how it shifts in various stages of the migration process (e.g. preparation, departure, during, return), this paper examines the construction of the ‘good left-behind child’ among mother-away transnational families from the northern Philippines. Specifically, this paper is animated by the following questions:

1. Who is the ideal Filipino left-behind child and how are they constructed within transnational families across various stages of the migration process?
2. What is the role played by left-behind children in this construction and what are the ways in which they are responding?

The value of characterising the ideal left-behind child across different stages of the migration process such as at the onset, during, and in the imagined future is to explore how earlier and emergent notions of ideal childhood, shifting labour conditions, and rising entrepreneurialism in the villages are interacting and are negotiated by transnational families (especially left-behind children), and in turn, adjust notions of the ideal left-behind child. For example, it is compelling to investigate how traditional Filipino notions of ‘filial piety’ drawn from Confucian ethics interact with more recent youth cultures such as Filipino rap, P-Pop, and K-pop influences, and how do families negotiate these contradictions in raising the good left-behind child? Equally important is the interaction between older imaginaries of the mobility-induced good life espoused by earlier generations and the emerging refusal of the mobility imperative (de los Reyes, forthcoming) by contemporary left-behind children, and how do they implicate children’s moral standing within their families and communities?
This paper reports findings from two projects that employed object elicitation, vision boards, interviews, and digital ethnographic approach as data gathering strategies in working with 6 migrant women domestic workers, and 7 left-behind children in two instances of fieldwork, one in 2017 and another in 2021. The migrant mothers are deployed in elementary occupations, specifically as Foreign Domestic Workers, in places such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Cyprus while the left-behind children are 15 to 18 years old and were in their Year 11 or 12 of secondary schooling in the northern Philippines when fieldwork was conducted.

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Contributors

Author: Elizer Jay de los Reyes

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