Transnational Childhood and the Globalization of Intimacy

Abstract

International migration has changed drastically in the last few decades, because globalization has turned it into a transnational phenomenon that affects not only world economics, but the well-being of migrants and their families as well. Nevertheless the majority of the studies on migration concentrates on the socio-economic effects of migration and pays attention mostly to those, who actually migrate, disregarding the enormous challenges that newly created transnational families have to meet and ignoring the fate of the left behind children. But it is more than anyone else a child, being usually the most vulnerable part of a transnational family, who can tell us a lot about the hidden agendas of migration, about the losses, the loneliness and the emotional pain of separation that cannot be compensated by gifts and phone calls alone. The following reflections deal with some of these ignored realities of transnational migration and with left behind children.