Beyond grit: unsettling normative narratives of left-behind children’s resilience

Migration is often framed as a strategy for families to overcome economic hardship, yet it simultaneously generates its own adversities – most notably prolonged parent-child separation with profound effects on left-behind children’s well-being and schooling. This duality demands resilience not only from adults but also from left-behind children in transnational families. Recent scholarship increasingly recognises that resilience, particularly academic resilience, is not an innate trait, but a relational process shaped by home, school, and community structures. <br/><br/>This paper explores how Filipino left-behind children navigate challenges arising from maternal migration, foregrounding their perspectives to address their persistent underrepresentation in migration research. By adopting an intergenerational lens, this paper moves beyond dominant resilience frameworks that narrowly emphasise grit and individual coping. Instead, it reconceptualises resilience as dynamic, embodied, sensory, and collective – a socio-cultural process deeply rooted in relationships. Positioning children’s resilience as a form of labour and lived experience, this paper critiques output-oriented models and offers a timely departure from individualising and responsibilising narratives.<br/><br/>Drawing on 32 narrative interviews – with 12 left-behind children and 19 Filipina migrant mothers employed as nurses in the UK and Australia, and as domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore – the study incorporates written, spoken and visual representations to capture migration stories. In doing so, it addresses two critical gaps: the persistent absence of children’s voices in migration discourse and the neglect of resilience’s embodied and affective dimensions, offering a richer, more relational understanding of how transnational families endure and adapt.<br/>