Separation and Reunification: The Experiences of Adolescents Living in Transnational Families

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There are increasing numbers of mothers as well as fathers who engage in long-term migration to support their children and other family members in their home countries. In this article, the current state of the literature about children and adolescents left at home in these transnational families is surveyed and reviewed. The article reviews the effects on children of the process of separation from parents, the impact of gifts and remittances home, communication with distant parents and the quality of life with their substitute caregivers. The effects of immigration in late childhood or adolescence on these separated children are examined, as well as what is known about the processes of adaptation and family reunification, including migration traumas, impact of gender, and educational outcomes. Suggestions are given for pediatric clinicians working with reunifying families. Gaps in the literature are highlighted and the need for research into factors that promote successful family re-engagement and overall adaptation upon reunification.

Introduction

In Chicago, a Spanish language television commercial shows a warehouse store where immigrants can buy computers, appliances, and furniture with direct shipping to Mexico and Central America. Fathers enter the store and, in an inset, smiling children, surrounded by tropical greenery, wave and shout “gracias, papi!” In the fictional movie Under the Same Moon,1 and in the journalistic account Enrique's Journey,2 boys travel alone from Mexico and Central America to find and reunite with their mothers who are working in the United States. In film and print, these are stories of transnational families, with social, economic and emotional ties that span national borders.

But what happens at the end of Enrique's journey? How are children faring when their mothers and fathers work countries and continents away, and what happens when families reunite? Do the sacrifices made by parents and children pay off in improved educational, developmental and mental health outcomes for children and families? In this paper, we address issues confronting youth living in transnational families by reviewing the research literature on the effects of migration-related family separation and reunification on children and adolescents, with implications for healthcare and suggestions for future research.

There are an estimated 214 million immigrants and refugees worldwide, 20% of whom are in the United States (U.S.).3 Unauthorized immigrants comprise approximately 28% of the total U.S. immigrant population.4 The majority of all U.S. immigrants, as well as the majority of unauthorized immigrants, are from Mexico.5, 6

In contrast to earlier waves of migration, women are now as likely as men to be the first immigrant in a family7 and may stay in the host country longer than male compatriots.8 In fact, nearly half of the U.S. migrants are now women.9 Historically, women have migrated both within and across national borders to improve the lives of their own families by caring for the homes, children and elderly relatives of wealthier women.8 Currently, many hail from poor families in the urban and rural areas in the Caribbean,10 Mexico and Central America.11, 12 However, in recent years middle-class women have joined this migrant stream. Since the 1980s, most female migrants from the Philippines have been college-educated and professionally trained women who can earn more in domestic work in wealthier countries than they can as professionals at home.13, 14, 15 There has been large-scale internal migration from rural to urban areas in China,16 migration out of other South Asian8, 17 and Southeast (SE) Asian14, 18 countries, as well as migration out of Africa,19 all of which involves maternal–child separation to greater or lesser degrees.

One-fifth of U.S. immigrants are children and 40% of the child immigrants are unauthorized.5 Their proportion in the U.S. population rises with age, accounting for children who migrate in late childhood, often called the 1.5 Generation.20 Unaccompanied minors, crossing the border without a parent or guardian, have long been an acknowledged and undercounted part of the immigrant stream to the U.S.,21, 22 and at least 20,000 youths may be crossing the border from Mexico alone every year.23 Numbers and particulars of unaccompanied and other undocumented immigrant youths are largely unknown, as most apprehended youths (over 100,000 in 2006) agree to return to Mexico without formal detention and processing.21 The majority of minors detained in the U.S. are young men from Central America,21, 24 and recent studies show that they endorse poverty, family reunification and fleeing violence in their home countries as their primary reasons for migrating.24, 25 Current homicide rates in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are among the highest in the world,26 and the numbers of detained unaccompanied Central American minors in the first half of 2012 was almost double that of 2011,24 even as migration from Mexico has declined during the same period.27

Transnational families visit, call and participate in decisions and celebrations on both sides of the border, and these ongoing connections have led researchers and clinicians to question traditional concepts and measures of acculturation.28, 29 Anthropologists30, 31 and sociologists32 have theorized about the impact of modern mass migration on identity formation and the globalization of electronic media that allow migrants and distant family members to be immersed in two cultures simultaneously. Health researchers and clinicians have just begun to understand the impact of these changes on the lives of immigrant families.29, 33, 34, 35, 36 As Falicov33 noted, “Because lives and relations are linked across borders, transnationalism offers an attractive, and at times deceiving, imagined possibility of living with two hearts rather than with one divided heart (p. 339).”

Traditional immigration scholarship viewed families as indivisible units surrounding male wage earners.8, 37 Breaking with this tradition, Hondagneu-Sotelo35 studied the impact of gender on all the aspects of migration, starting a rich and ongoing body of literature about migration in which gender is prominent.11, 14, 15, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47

How do gender relationships, changing or traditional, impact children in transnational families? While immigrant parents share household chores and childrearing when both are working,38, 41 traditional ideals of father as breadwinner and mother as nurturing parent in the home are remarkably similar across cultures. Immigrant families from Mexico,11, 47, 48 Ecuador,44 the Dominican Republic,41 and the Philippines,15, 38 describe the father's parenting role as providing economically, engendering respect and disciplining children, while mothers are in charge of emotional and moral development. A father migrating for work without his children is fulfilling the traditional provider role, while a mother who migrates for work is breaking with tradition. While both mothers and fathers in the transnational literature report sadness about their distant children,40, 42, 49 only mothers report feeling guilty42 and the impact of paternal and maternal migrations on parent–child relations may differ.

Migrating mothers may leave children at home for political and economic reasons: legal restrictions on immigration and their own ability to pay for better childcare at home.8, 12, 14, 15 However, others feel that their children receive a better upbringing in their home country,38, 50 are safer and better supervised12, 51, 52 and protected from racial and anti-immigrant prejudice.53 A study of 157 Mexican and Central American domestic workers in the Los Angeles area found that 75% were mothers, and of these, 40% had at least one child living in their home countries.12

When mothers are not able to take their children with them, they use a variety of caretaking strategies from a distance, including paying childcare workers,12, 54 and placing children with family members, such as grandmothers, aunts, or older sisters, who then receive regular remittances and gifts to improve the economic stability of the household.12, 15, 45 Child shifting, or placing children with relatives or friends for a variety of reasons, is a relatively common practice in the Caribbean,50, 55, 56 Africa,51, 57 the Philippines58 and Peru,59, 60 even when parents have not left the country. But when the migrant mother pays extended family for childcare with remittances and gifts, social and economic relationships of caring coexist, and the impact of these transformations on children is unknown.8, 54

Section snippets

Literature Review

Migration studies, research about transnational families, and family adjustment to immigration are dynamic areas in current health and social sciences literature. There are many different types of parent–child separations related to migration. In some instances, parents migrate as temporary workers to another, wealthier country, with legal employment and no chance of permanent settlement; in these cases, any reunifications will occur when parents return to their home country. In the research

Attachment Theory

John Bowlby developed attachment theory by studying the behaviors of normal infants and children who had experienced temporary separations from and reunifications with their parents, in order to make generalizations about their mourning behaviors.73 In the 1940s and 1950s, these separations might have been war-related and were often the result of hospital policies that strictly limited parental visiting.74 Bowlby described attachment as a homeostatic control mechanism that is preferentially

Reactions of Children to Separation

Whether expressed through interviews with parents,11, 38, 45, 101, 102 caretakers,45, 103 or children,15 pain at parent–child separation is a universal finding (see Table 1). Parents viewed the separation as a sacrifice for the benefit of the children,11, 12, 38, 45, 104 but children showed some ambivalence at being the beneficiaries of such sacrifices.15, 72 Researchers documented various ways that children expressed reactions to their parents leaving, including anger, distress, feelings of

Reunification

Studies of children or adolescents who have migrated to rejoin their parents have covered a broad range of sizes, locations, and time frames and include retrospective studies of adults. To the extent that premigration experiences affect the adolescent's adaptation to life in the U.S. or Canada, these studies also address the impact of prior separation. This section will cover the effects on children and adolescents of the timing of migration, the stressors before and during migration, early and

Recommendations During Separation

While parents report that their distant children are always in their hearts,40, 42, 45 they may not be effectively communicating this love across borders.61, 70 Despite the technical and emotional difficulties with parent phone calls,15, 72 interviews with children or adults after their own reunification have underscored the importance of steady communication and visual representations of parents while children are apart.65, 70, 121 Resentment may be unavoidable. It has surfaced as a barrier to

Acknowledgments

This literature review was supported by grants from Programa de Investigacion en Migracion y Salud (PIMSA), UC MEXUS, and Sigma Theta Tau Alpha Eta chapter.

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