Sukli: uneven exchanges of care work of children left behind in Filipino transnational families

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complicated affective realities of children in the Philippines who engage in the labour of caring from the place of being ‘left behind’. I explore how children demonstrate care for their migrant mothers through various schooling tasks, undergirded by emotional dissonance, and often not through an idealized notion of love or tenderness. These acts demonstrate children allocate care work in transnational families in spite of complex emotional underpinnings I argue that the emotionality in those acts may be anger or frustration but children left behind are making sense of their labour through a culturally localized concept called sukli that connotes uneven exchange in care work to maintain the operations of a transnational family. The paper adds to our understanding of children’s affective experiences of migration within an Asian context.

KEYWORDS:

• Children left behind
• migration
• transnational family
• emotions
• emotional dissonance
• care work

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank migrant parents in New York City and their families in Manila who offered their stories to help us deepen our understanding of transnational family life. I am also thankful to community organizations that supported the collection and analysis in this paper: Kabalikat Domestic Worker Support Network, Philippine Forum-New York City, Migrante New York, Gabriela USA. I thank Suzanne Schmidt and Joi Barrios for the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.