Understanding Mobile Childhoods: Children of Migrations from the Philippines to Europe

Contemporary parental migrations have resulted in the rise of many transnational families characterized by solidarity despite family separation across geographical distance. Children of these families have attracted strong scientific attention for the last twenty-five years, which reflects the existing social concern about their well-being as they grow up separated from one or both of their parents. When family reunification takes place in the receiving country of the migrant parents, children themselves become migrants. Such mobile childhood is considered atypical in both the children’s society of origin and of destination. How to capture the diversity of childhood experiences of these children migrants? In what way do their experiences present scientific challenges to the study of migrant children and their mobile childhoods? In this presentation, we explore these questions by focusing on the childhood experiences of Filipino migrants’ children who grew up partly in the Philippines and partly in Europe, notably in France and in Italy. Here, we examine their experiences in terms of mobility to unlock their subjectivities and agency. The results of our ethnographic fieldwork among children of Filipino immigrants in France and in Italy demonstrate the different forms of mobility of young migrants throughout the migration process. Using mobility as an analytical lens, we attempt to move beyond nation-state borders by considering carefully the context and temporalities of mobile children’s childhoods.