The impact of parents working as migrant workers on the health of left-behind children

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-227
Author(s):  
Sun Wenkai
Author(s):  
Nirmal Aryal ◽  
Pramod R. Regmi ◽  
Edwin van Teijlingen ◽  
Steven Trenoweth ◽  
Pratik Adhikary ◽  
...  

Spousal separation, lack of companionship, and increased household responsibilities may trigger mental health problems in left-behind female spouses of migrant workers. This study aimed to examine mental ill-health risk in the left-behind female spouses of international migrant workers in Nepal. A cross-sectional survey was carried out in the Nawalparasi district. Study areas were purposively chosen; however, participants were randomly selected. Nepali versions of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) were used. Mental ill-health risk was prevalent in 3.1% of the participants as determined by GHQ. BDI identified mild or moderate depression in 6.5% of the participants with no one having severe depression. In bivariate analysis, a high frequency of communication with the husband was associated with lower mental ill-health risk and depression, as well as increasing resilience. Reduced return intervals of husbands and a high frequency of remittance were also associated with a low GHQ score. In a multiple regression model, adjusting for potential confounding variables, participants who communicated with their husbands at least once a day had a greater mean CD-RISC score (i.e., high resilience against mental ill-health risk) compared to those who did so at least once a week; a mean difference of 3.6 (95% CI 0.4 to 6.9), P = 0.03. To conclude, a low mental ill-health risk was found in the female spouses of migrants.


Author(s):  
Huajun Wu ◽  
Zhiyong Cai ◽  
Qing Yan ◽  
Yi Yu ◽  
Ning Neil Yu

A paucity of public service afforded to migrant workers often begets a wide range of social problems. In China, hundreds of millions of migrant worker parents have to leave children behind in their hometowns. This paper investigated the long-term effects of the childhood experience of being left behind on the mental well-being of late adolescents. Mandatory university personality inventory (UPI) surveys (involving psychosomatic problems such as anxiety, depression, and stress) were conducted at a university in Jiangsu, China, during 2014–2017. The study sample consisted of 15,804 first-year college students aged between 15 and 28 years. The PSM method and the OLS regression model were employed. Controlling for the confounding factors (gender, age, single-child status, hometown location, ethnicity, and economic status), our empirical investigation demonstrated that childhood left-behind experience significantly worsened the mental health of the study sample, increasing the measure of mental ill-being by 0.661 standard deviations (p < 0.01). Moreover, the effects were consistently significant in subsamples divided by gender, single-child status, and hometown location; and the effects were greater for females, single-child students, and urban residents.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-30
Author(s):  
Nikita Bhattarai ◽  
Naresh Manandhar ◽  
Shruti Shah ◽  
Renu Twanabasu ◽  
Santripti, Shrestha ◽  
...  

Introduction: Labor migration has become a means to make ends meet for low-income countries. It plays a key role to provide employment opportunities and has helped in the improvement of the standard of living. With the alarming rise of migrating workers, it becomes important to acknowledge the effects of migration on both the migrant workers in the destination country as well as families left behind at the place of origin. The objective of this study was to find out the status of migration of population in Khopasi village and their attitude towards the effects of migration on families left behind.  Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 256 residents of Khopasi, Kavrepalanchowk district from 10-15th November 2019. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire to assess the status of migration of immediate family members as well as the attitude towards migration and its effects. Results: The prevalence of migrant workers was 39.8%. The process of migration was assisted by their migrated relatives 59 (19.1%) and by foreign employment agencies 30 (12.92 %). The expenses for migration were managed by bank loan 34 (33.34%). Among102 migrant workers, 54(52.9%) are still working abroad whereas 48 (47.1%) have returned to Nepal. The main reason for migrant workers to go abroad was unemployment 59 (57.8%) in Nepal. Out of 102 who migrated, most of them 39 (38.23%) have spent 1-3 years abroad while 76 (68.6%) send remittance regularly to their family members at home around 1-3 lakhs/year. Among all the migrant worker  37(36.27%) reported some form of disease and disability. There was a positive attitude toward family and the country’s economy but the overall attitude towards migration was negative. Conclusion: In this study, remittance sent by migrant workers to their families was not adequate as there were no visible financial benefits and negative health consequences were also present. There are other impacts of migration like broken families, separation, difficulty in the rearing of children, mental health of elderly were seen on the families left behind. Various studies are required to further analyze the impact of migration other than remittance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 926 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gui Ye ◽  
Yuhe Wang ◽  
Yuxin Zhang ◽  
Liming Wang ◽  
Houli Xie ◽  
...  

Total factor productivity (TFP) is of critical importance to the sustainable development of construction industry. This paper presents an analysis on the impact of migrant workers on TFP in Chinese construction sector. Interestingly, Solow Residual Approach is applied to conduct the analysis through comparing two scenarios, namely the scenario without considering migrant workers (Scenario A) and the scenario with including migrant workers (Scenario B). The data are collected from the China Statistical Yearbook on Construction and Chinese Annual Report on Migrant Workers for the period of 2008–2015. The results indicate that migrant workers have a significant impact on TFP, during the surveyed period they improved TFP by 10.42% in total and promoted the annual average TFP growth by 0.96%. Hence, it can be seen that the impact of migrant workers on TFP is very significant, whilst the main reason for such impact is believed to be the improvement of migrant workers’ quality obtained mainly throughout learning by doing.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Dee ◽  
Brian A. Jacob

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cut Maghfirah Faisal ◽  
Sherly Saragih Turnip

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to compare loneliness between the left-behind children of migrant workers and the non-left-behind ones, and identify the most significant predictors of loneliness among the left-behind children. Design/methodology/approach Incidental sampling was performed to select 629 participants aged 11–16 from 5 schools in the rural areas of Karawang and Lombok in Indonesia. They filled in paper-and-pencil self-report inventories. Findings Left-behind children were significantly lonelier than their counterparts were. Emotional loneliness was more affected by parental absence compared to social loneliness. Left-behind children would be more susceptible to experience loneliness if they had more access to entertainment gadgets, experienced less support and intimacy from friends, had been left by their migrant parents more than once, were female, had low self-esteem, experienced emotional difficulties and rarely communicated with their parents. Research limitations/implications Qualitative research was needed to provide more elaborative explanation about the findings. Practical implications Parents needed to consider the psychological cost and benefit of working abroad to their children. Governments could intervene by limiting the duration and frequency of work among the migrant workers. Social implications Some beneficial implications to prevent and reduce loneliness among left-behind children were provided, such as by maintaining the frequency and quality of communication with the children, motivating and guiding the children to interact with their peers and spend less time on entertainment gadgets, as well as encouraging the children to engage in several positive activities to enhance their self-esteem. Originality/value This study enriched the understanding about complex relationship between parental presence and adolescents’ mental health despite the fact that adolescents seemed to be more interested in relationships with peers.


2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Hugo

Indonesia is the country most affected by the Asian financial crisis which began in mid-1997 and has been the slowest to recover from it. In the present paper the effects of the first two and a half years of the crisis on international population movements influencing Indonesia are discussed. The crisis has increased economic pressures on potential migrant workers in Indonesia and the result has been increased out-movement. In both pre and post-crisis situations this was dominated by women, at least among official migrant workers. The crisis has tightened the labor market in some of Indonesia's main destination countries but the segmentation of the labor market in those countries has limited the impact of the crisis in reducing jobs in those countries. The crisis has created more pressure on undocumented migrants in destination countries but the extent of repatriation, while higher than in the pre-crisis situation, has been limited. The crisis has directly or indirectly affected other international movements influencing Indonesia including expatriate movement to Indonesia and longer-term, south-north migration out of the country. The policy implications of these changes are discussed including the fact that the crisis has led to an increased appreciation of the importance of contract labor migration by government and greater attention being paid to improving the system for migrants themselves and the country as a whole.


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