Researchers partnered with IPA Philippines to assess how parental decisions to work abroad affect their children's education and to understand the impacts of their absence.

Labor migration is common in low- and middle-income countries, as individuals move abroad to high-income countries for temporary work. A significant subpopulation of these international migrants are parents. In the Philippines, over one-third of all Overseas Filipino Workers have school-age children. Furthermore, approximately 27 percent of children experience parental absence due to work migration in their lifetime.¹ This absence can have significant impacts on children’s educational development.

Researchers partnered with IPA Philippines to assess the decisions of parents to seek work outside of the Philippines and the impacts of their absence on their children’s educational outcomes. To do this, researchers conducted phone surveys with 1,103 migrants and their household members and collected administrative data from the Philippines Department of Migrant Workers and the International Labor Organization on parents’ overseas job contracts. They measured indicators such as the change in parents’ time and money investments as their children age; how parents internalize their children’s needs when they decide to migrate more than once; and how the impacts of parental migration on children’s education outcomes vary by household demographics.

Results will be available later in 2024.

Sources

^1. Antia, Khatia, Johannes Boucsein, Andreas Deckert, Peter Dambach, Justina Račaitė, Genė Šurkienė, Thomas Jaenisch, Olaf Horstick, and Volker Winkler. 2020. "Effects of International Labour Migration on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Left-Behind Children: A Systematic Literature Review" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 12: 4335. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17124335

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