Social orphanhood and deprived parenthood in a migrant family as a threat to demographic security: is there light at the end of the tunnel?

Abstract

The relevance of the research is the spread of the phenomena of social orphanhood and deprived parenthood due to the labor migration of family members.The problem of the research is the expansion of labor migration, the spread of social orphanhood, the development of deprived parenthood, on the one hand, and the lack of conceptual justification for the relationships between these phenomena, on the other.The goal of the research is to consider social orphanhood and deprived parenthood in a migrant family as a threat to demographic security.The research methods. The work used data from: 1) a questionnaire survey of returned Kyrgyz labor migrants who worked in Russia and then returned to Kyrgyzstan; 2) semi-structured interviews of labor migrants in Russia; 3) quantitative and qualitative content analysis of cases presented in the essays of migrant children.The Results. Thus, social orphanhood and deprived parenthood in migrant families, due its large scale, are considered as a threat to demographic security at several levels: a parent or a child, family as a whole, as well as countries of origin and reception. It has been determined that when children of migrants stay with elderly grandparents, a difficult situation arises, since grandparents sometimes have difficulty with self-care, and it is twice as difficult for them to cope with grandchildren. Children begin to miss classes at school, academic performance decreases, a culture of communication is not formed, and problems with the law appear. In cases where children of migrants remain to live with people who are not relatives to them, the level of safety of minors is significantly reduced, accompanied by beatings and murders. An analysis of the opinions of migrants, their children and experts shows that social orphanhood and deprived parenthood are a threat to demographic security.The Key Findings. Social orphanhood is interconnected with the phenomenon of deprived parenthood, since labor migrants feel responsible both for their own sons and daughters and for their elderly parents. The key social negative of the situation is natural and repeated reproduction of social orphanhood and deprived parenthood in migrant families.