Transnational Parenthood and Migrant Subjective Well-Being in Italy

Transnational families are commonly associated with nuclear families composed by a couple, with or without young children, where at least one adult member is currently living abroad. Despite their estimated prevalence worldwide, the scarcity of data on the topic has caused a lack of attention to this phenomenon in both policy and science. Little is known especially about the effects engendered by the interplay between migration and family relations at a distance on individual well-being of both migrant parents and their left-behind children. In most European countries, including Italy, this kind of study is unprecedented. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the subjective well-being of migrants currently residing in Italy who have children left behind, compared with childless migrants and with migrant parents living with their children. Multivariate Abstract: regression analysis applied to individual-level data from Istat’s Survey on Social condition and integration of foreign citizens 2011–2012 shows that transnational parents experience lower levels of self-rated health (assessed on a 1–5 scale) compared with migrants with different family statuses, and that the well-being loss associated with transnational parenthood is strongly gendered. Controlling for individual characteristics, socio-economic conditions, and migration background, our analysis ascertains that men’s subjective well-being does not vary depending on their family status, while transnational mothers experience significantly lower well-being compared with childless migrant women. The struggle with the emotional difficulties of transnational family life raises relevant policy-related questions that call for conceptual and methodological advances in migration data collection.