Children of Migration and Their Well-Being

Vania B. Salas, Pennsylvania State University
David Ader, Pennsylvania State University

Findings regarding immigrants’ well-being focus mostly on international migrants without distinguishing between parents and children’s perception of well-being. Some studies pay attention to different indicators of psychological well-being without including an overall indicator that comprises psychological and economics spheres. We propose to use an indicator of perceptions of quality of life which has a broad definition beyond only objective or subjective well-being. This study involves children living in urban areas with rural migrants parents in Peru. The main hypothesis is that having rural migrant parents affects children’s perception of well-being and this effect will differ depending on if the migrant is the father or the mother. Using an ordered logit method, the results support the hypothesis proposed, that is, children of migrant parents are more likely to report getting worse if they have a rural migrant mother with no statistical effect of having a rural migrant father.