 I'm Salvaturba Bonus and this week's problem of the week is left-behind children. The problem of left-behind children is most closely identified with contemporary China, but the problem is much older and much broader than that. Children have been left behind, at least since the beginnings of industrialization, as women went to work in factories in the years around 1800 in Western Europe. China's left-behind children problem closely parallels Europe's problem of 200 years ago and will presumably disappear over time. But other countries' problems with separated families are part and parcel of contemporary globalization and thus are likely to continue for a very long time. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, young women moved from the countryside to work in the factories of the new towns of Western Europe. It seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. Since women are almost everywhere the primary caregivers for children, the equation women away from home equals children living with grandparents holds almost all over the world. Most left-behind children live with older relatives, either grandparents or great-ancing great-uncles. In many societies, fathers left behind are not culturally considered fit or able to raise their own children. So we have these odd situations where in some cases fathers may live in the same villages as their children, but not as the primary caregivers for those children. Usually, however, and especially in China, both mothers and fathers are working in the city, while children stay behind in rural areas with older relatives. In many cases, the caregivers of the left-behind children themselves need caregivers. Many of these rural communities in rural and western China consist entirely of children and the elderly. Children can end up playing the dual role of cared for and caregiver for elderly grandparents. Now, China is the most striking case of left-behind children in the 21st century, mainly because of the sheer size of the problem. China has an adult floating population of around 250 million people. Those are people who have irregular household registration status, usually meaning that the parents are registered to live in the countryside, but in fact live in the city. That's about one-quarter of the entire adult population of China who live where they're not registered to live. The Hukou, or registration system in China, legally specifies the place where a person is allowed to live, and historically, government services like schooling and healthcare could only be accessed at that place. Now, these restrictions are starting to disappear in 2015 and 2016, and in the 2016 to 2020 five-year plan, they're supposed to disappear almost entirely. Already starting in 2015, schools in China cities have been instructed to educate the children of rural migrants on the same basis as they educate urban children. The law is one thing. The reality is something different. In reality, there are endemic reports of rural children being excluded from school or demands being made that the parents of children, the migrant parents of rural children, having to pay illegal fees for things like books and uniforms in order to enroll their children in urban schools. As a result, even if they can legally get their children to urban schools, many parents in China still leave their children in the countryside because they simply can't afford to raise them in China's cities. The most widely accepted estimate is that there are around 60 million left behind children, about half of them of preschool age, age zero through five years old. This is especially worrying for the youngest children who grow up sometimes the first five years of their life with absolutely no contact from their parents. The stories are rife of children who don't see their parents for two or three years at a time. No one knows the exact number of children who don't see their parents on an annual basis, but even if children see their parents once a year, that is hardly enough for a two or three or a four-year-old child to really know who that person is. But it's not just China. China is the best known case, but millions of women and men from other countries also work overseas away from their families. One striking case is the Philippines. About one million Filipino women work overseas in about half of them in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore. They're not allowed to keep their children with them in their work countries. And if they have children in their work countries, they're deported to have their babies back in the Philippines. About a million Filipino men also work overseas. Many of them literally on the sea. The number one country for people staffing ships are people of Philippine nationality. Men from Latin America commonly work in the United States, women as well, leaving families behind in Mexico and Central America. And the economic models of cities like Singapore and Dubai depend on the existence of an endless flow of low-wage guest workers for their very existence. Cities like Singapore and Dubai could not exist as global cities without the millions of Filipino, Bangladeshi, and Indian guest workers, all people of working age without children who contribute to their economies. The situation is extreme in Singapore where out of a population of 5.5 million people, 2.3 million are low-wage guest workers. The psychological problems associated with being left behind include depression, anxiety, and hopelessness. It's pretty obvious that children four years old can't go for a year or more without seeing their parents, without suffering serious problems. The psychological problems are at least well understood. I mean, we know that they're big and we know that they're serious, but the sociological problems remain a mystery. How will these children fare in education? Will these children have higher rates of criminality and drug abuse? Will these children feel obliged to care for their own parents when their parents reach old age? We simply don't know the answers to questions like this. The psychological problems are tragic, but at least we know what they are. The sociological problems are simply a big question mark. Similarly, the impact on parents is also a big question mark. Presumably, parents suffer severe psychological trauma when they leave their children behind, but we haven't studied this very much. We certainly don't know how their family relationships are affected. There is some qualitative research that not surprisingly suggests that relationships between men and women deteriorate when they're separated for long periods of time due to work, but we don't have any large scale quantitative studies of how this may be changing society. Finally, I think we should be asking ourselves what is the impact on societies, entire societies, of basing society on a social model that does not allow parents to live with their own children. This may seem unimaginable to people in places like Australia and Western Europe, but in many of the globalizing countries of the middle income band of the world, China, Brazil, Mexico, these kinds of social models are simply accepted as part and parcel of contemporary globalization. Is this something we should accept as our future? And if not, what is the alternative? We don't really have good answers to these questions. The takeaways, first, China's problem of left behind children originates in its Hukou system of household registration, but it's much bigger than just Hukou reform. Second, it is estimated that there are some 60 million left behind children in China, around half of them age five or under. And internationally, global guest worker models have created many separated families in the Philippines, Central America, throughout South and Southeast Asia, in many places around the world. And we really haven't come to terms with what that means either for the Sending Society or looking in the mirror for us in the receiving societies as well. Thank you for watching this lecture. You can find out more about me at salvatorbabonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on contemporary global affairs.