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The purpose of this study is to examine the association between parental migration and adolescents’ styles of close relationships with parents, friends and romantic partners.

In total, 197 adolescents from Cuenca (Ecuador) participated in the study, of which 35% reported a background of parental migration. The Behavioral Systems Questionnaire was used to assess participants’ relational styles.

The study reveals that, although parental migration is associated with the development of lower secure styles for parents and friends, it is not associated with the development of insecure styles. Moreover, parental migration does not appear to be associated with the development of romantic styles. Based on the differential impact of the migration of one or two parents, the migration of two parents appeared to have a stronger association with lower secure styles.

The results are discussed in light of the socio-cultural context in which parental migration occurs in Ecuador, which may offer clue variables in shaping the relational styles of adolescents. The study addresses an important consequence of migration focusing on a scarce studies group, adolescents who stay in their home country while their parents migrate. Moreover, its main findings challenge the preconceptions that parent-child separations necessarily involve a direct negative impact on relational functioning.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of adult children’s migration on the smoking behavior of rural parents who are left behind and raise the concern that the rural residents’ increasing tendency to migrate to urban areas in China nowadays could encourage such a behavior.

Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and applying propensity score matching method and individual-level fixed effects model, this paper addresses the potential endogeneity issues that may arise between the children’s migration decisions and parental smoking behavior.

This study’s results indicate that rural parents left behind by their emigrant children indeed are more likely to sustain their smoking habit. The validated smoking effect of emigration calls for effective government programs that entail intervention to curb such potentially aggravating health risk, especially among middle-aged and older fathers.

This paper is the first to examine the impact of children’s migration on the smoking behavior of left-behind parents in rural households in China. Our findings call for immediate attention to the smoking behavior of older age cohort in China as the scale of rural−urban migration trend is expected to increase. Moreover, given that many countries in Asia, such as India, Vietnam and Indonesia, are confronting similar issues, our findings could provide useful implications for smoking cessation and control policies in those countries.

Households suffering from poverty often rely on parental migration and/or paid child labour for survival. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of parental migration on paid child labour and human capital formation in a dynamic context, explicitly taking the effects of parental migration on child’s school and home education into account.

The author utilises a mathematical method. In particular, an overlapping-generations model is built, with agents who have a two-period life. The amount of paid child labour is determined as a solution of the utility maximisation problem.

Contrary to intuition, parental migration possibilities do not necessarily reduce paid child labour. In addition, parental migration possibilities do not necessarily raise human capital. Moreover, a trade-off might exist between alleviating paid child labour and raising human capital under parental migration possibilities.

Migration possibilities are given exogenously evenly among potential migrants by the foreign country. However, in general, they depend on potential migrants’ human capital so that migration possibilities differ across agents.

Migration is usually considered effective in alleviating poverty. However, since it does not necessarily reduce paid child labour and raise human capital, migration should be regulated in some cases as a means to escape from poverty.

This paper deals with parental migration and paid child labour in an identical dynamic model. This paper assumes that human capital is built not only by school education but also home education, the amount of which changes with the duration of parental migration.

China’s rapid pace of urbanization has resulted in millions of rural residents migrating from rural areas to urban areas for better job opportunities. Due to economic pressures and the nature of China’s demographic policies, many of these migrants have been forced to leave their children with relatives – typically paternal grandparents – at home in the countryside. Thus, while income for most migrant families has risen, a major unintended consequence of this labor movement has been the emergence of a potentially vulnerable sub-population of left-behind children (LBCs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of parental migration on both the academic performance and mental health of LBCs.

Longitudinal data were drawn from three waves of a panel survey that followed the same students and their families – including their migration behavior (i.e. whether both parents, one parent, no parent migrated) – between 2015 and 2016. The survey covers more than 33,000 students in one province of central China. The authors apply a student fixed-effects model that controls for both observable and unobservable confounding variables to explicate the causal effects of parental migration on the academic and mental health outcomes for LBC. The authors also employ these methods to test whether these effects differ by the type of migration or by gender of the child.

The authors found no overall impact of parental migration on either academic performance or mental health of LBCs, regardless of the type of migration behavior. The authors did find, however, that when the authors examined heterogeneous effects by gender (which was possible due to the large sample size), parental migration resulted in significantly higher anxiety levels for left-behind girls. The results suggest that parental migration affects left-behind boys and girls differently and that policymakers should take a more tailored approach to addressing the problems faced by LBCs.

The main contributions of this paper come from the large and representative sample, as well as the causal effects analysis of being left-behind on both academic performance and mental health. First, the paper uses comprehensive panel data from a representative and populous province in China, and the sample size is the largest one among LBC-related papers to the authors’ knowledge. Second, the paper separately examines the causal effects on the student outcomes of different migration strategies. Third, the paper analyzes the heterogeneous effects of different migration strategies on LBC gender. The authors believe that the paper makes a key contribution to the literature.

There is a considerable gap in the literature examining the effect of parental international migration on children’s health in Pakistan. The author aims to examine the impact of parental international labour migration on the health (anthropometric measures) of children left-behind in Pakistan.

The author investigates the impact of parental international labour migration on the health (anthropometric measures) of children left-behind in Pakistan using econometric estimation techniques and the latest wave of the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017–2018. The main child health measures the author uses include weight-for-age (WAZ) and height-for-age (HAZ) Z-scores for children under five years of age. Since unobservable factors may be vital determinants of the child nutrition outcomes, the author uses two unique instrumental variables to address the potential endogeneity problem.

The author finds that international migration improves the left-behind children’s weight-for-age and height-for-age nutritional outcomes, generating essential policy insights.

To the best of the auhtor’s knowledge, no previous study has been conducted on parental migration and left-behind children in Pakistan using the latest Demographic and Health Survey.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how parental migration due to poverty affects a child’s education and human capital formation through changes in the child’s supply of unpaid labour.

The paper uses a small open overlapping generations model where the parent migrates for the family’s subsistence and that the child has to give up a part of education to do the housework during the parent’s absence.

The paper finds that given the level of the human capital, reducing the child’s burden of housework and promoting parental migration to high-wage countries do not necessarily raise the amount of child’s education. The paper also finds a possible underdevelopment trap in the dynamic context.

Unlike previous studies on child labour, this paper focuses on unpaid labour, whose share is actually larger than that of paid labour. Even if paid labour is available, children cannot re-allocate their time from doing the housework to the market work; so the author cannot disregard this observation. Investigation into the dynamics of human capital formation under such child labour is new.

This study uses migrant household survey data from 2008 to 2009 to examine how parental migration decisions are associated with the nutritional status of children in rural and urban China. Results from instrumental variables regressions show a substantial adverse effect of children’s exposure to parental migration on height-for-age Z scores of left-behind children relative to children who migrate with their parents. Additional results from a standard Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, a quantile decomposition, and a counterfactual distribution analysis all confirm that children who are left behind in rural villages – usually because of the oppressive hukou system – have poorer nutritional status than children who migrate with their parents, and the gaps are biggest at lower portions of the distribution.

This chapter considers adolescents' migration aspirations in Kyrgyzstan. The discussion is based on the data obtained from 14 semi-structured interviews with adolescents as part of a qualitative study devoted to changes and continuities in biographic projecting across three generations. The study reveals the tendency towards having aspirations to move abroad for studies, work and/or life. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to consider the adolescents' motivation and to trace opportunities and challenges which may promote or hinder the realisation of individuals' migration projects. Special attention is paid to the role of an adolescent's family in this process. Adolescents' aspirations oriented towards future life in foreign countries are analysed with the help of two theoretical concepts – the concept of intergenerational solidarity and the concept of individualisation.

The analysis has shown that in Kyrgyzstan, adolescents' plans concerning going abroad are often framed by their extended families' interests and expectations. Adolescents' migration aspirations become a collective project of every family member for the sake of the family's future well-being. Parental expectation of care and support in their older age is one of the main limitations on adolescents' aspirations to move abroad. Those adolescents whose migration aspirations do not correspond with parental expectations may experience strong ambivalence, when they face the conflict between their individualised biographic projects oriented towards promising global opportunities and intergenerational solidarity norms.