Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Family context, socialization, and children's socio-emotional development - Project Summary/Abstract Migration affects hundreds of millions of families worldwide. Migrants often leave family members in their origin communities, which can challenge the wellbeing among the children. It is not well understood how migration influences left-behind family members’ socialization of children or children’s social competence and adjustment problems in sending communities. Migration is expected to alter how family members engage with, make expectations for, and provide for children, and alter children’s experiences and resources. These challenges and opportunities are expected to affect children’s social competence and adjustment problems. For instance, family members’ migration is hypothesized to predict less monitoring by left-behind caregivers and, in turn, higher drug and alcohol use for children. Benefits of migration are also anticipated, for instance, children’s increased responsibilities may positively predict their behavioral control. The project will follow children who previously participated in 2 time points of data collection and provide new data on the children, their primary caregivers, and their fathers at 2 additional time points. In combination with the prior waves of data from the same children and their caregivers, the project will yield high-quality information about children (5 to 17 years old at Time 1) across 6 years in a large sample that is representative of the study area. Key developmental transitions into school, adolescence, and adulthood are captured. The research will illustrate the complex ways in which family members’ migration predicts children’s socio-emotional outcomes. The specific aims of the project are: 1) to investigate reciprocal effects of caregivers’ socialization and children’s socio-emotional development, 2) to determine how family members’ migration is associated with socio-emotional outcomes, and how child, family, and migration characteristics moderate associations, and 3) to explore fathers’ roles in children’s socio-emotional outcomes, and compare fathers’ familial relationships and socialization for those who do versus do not participate in migration. This is an innovative extension of prior research; the project will provide a longer and more detailed view of children’s development and the dynamics of migration in and out of their households. Furthermore, including migrating and non-migrating fathers’ interviews supports an innovative investigation of their unique contributions to children’s socio-emotional development that goes beyond their economic contributions. Migrating fathers are expected to have poorer marital quality than non- migrating fathers, which may indirectly affect children’s socio-emotional outcomes via parent-child relationships. The new knowledge developed about migration’s costs and benefits will be useful for families as they adapt to changes migration brings to relationships and caregiving, help policy makers anticipate the challenges migration poses to children’s socio-emotional wellbeing, and inform children’s rights protections.
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