Childcare strategies of Javanese families with mothers on overseas labour contracts

Deteriorating economic conditions in the rural areas of Java have forced many families to reconsider how they are going to make ends meet, both now and in the future. Temporary female migration is increasingly seen as a viable option for families to improve their standards of living. Since the early 1980s thousands of Indonesian women have gone abroad, particularly to the Middle East, to work on two-year contracts as domestic servants. Many were married and already had young children. Under the conditions of the contract families had to remain in Indonesia, so children were entrusted as caregivers. This study examines the strategies for care of children under 5 years of age used by the caregivers of these female migrants bin the rural district if Purworejo, Central Java, Indonesia. Issues relating to how these children were cared for and how these childcare strategies affected their morbidity and nutritional status are examined. The study also explores how the impact of remittance transfers on household incomes affected childcare and children’s well-being. The analysis was based on the qualitative data collected specifically for the study and quantitative data drawn mainly from the 1992/93 AIDAB-funded Project on Women’s Work and Child Welfare (the 1992/93 Survei Ibu). Quantitative and qualitative data are used in a complementary manner to construct a comparative analysis of childcare strategies between families with migrant and non-migrant mothers. The results of the study show that the children of migrants and non-migrants had similar patterns of care. There was also no difference in the distribution of illness reported by caregivers in any of the age groups, whether or not the child belonged to a migrant woman. The study villages were relatively socially homogeneous and childcare was provided to migrants’ children by caregivers who had much in common with those caring for non-migrant children. This may explain much of the similarity in care and patterns of treatment of illnesses among migrants’ and non-migrants’ children. The similarities in the pattern of illness may also be due to limitations in the data: there were no data on the duration of illnesses and some illness episodes were included more than once because they were collected every three days. Similar percentages of illness observations among groups could conceal differences such as more episodes, or fewer episodes of longer duration. The analysis of child-nutritional status shows a high proportion of stunting among children of migrants. Despite the high earnings of women workers, the poverty that had originally motivated the mothers to migrate remained a factor in this situation. Children of migrant mothers did not benefit from their mothers’ earnings partly because of the consequence of spending patterns among family left behind. Remittances were often shared with the wide-kin network due to their role in taking care of the children while the mothers were away, reducing the potential benefit for the migrants’ children. Fathers, who usually controlled the spending of remittances, also tended to place a lower priority on food and health expenditures than mothers. Thus, it is possible that the children of migrant mothers were stunted because of that initial poverty and the spending pattern of remittances, not because of the effect of their mothers’ migration