Long-distance parenting and child-parent relationships of domestic workers in the Philippines

• Main Authors: Ferrer, Patrice Ines I., Sarte, Robert A., Jr., Sobria, Nicole, Tan, Gerik Raffertee B.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2019
• Subjects: Parenting > Philippines; Parent and child > Philippines
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/9497
• Institution: De La Salle University

Long-distance parenting has been used by domestic workers in the Philippines as a way to balance the need to live in a far distant location for their occupation and to parent their children left behind. Such compromise tales a psychological toll both on the children and the domestic workers themselves. Along with this is the lack of attention given by policy makers and institutions to domestic workers in the Philippines, which have caused them being denied of platforms to exercise their rights as employees, enabled abuse and exploitation from their employers, and being deprived from having better resources and benefits for both them and their families. This research aimed to steer the attention towards the experiences and challenges of long-distance parenting that domestic workers in the Philippines experience. At the same time, the paper, through the parenting competency model, intends to determine the limitations of long-distance parenting, in accordance to effective parenting functioning ad its need to meet child development. Participants were domestic workers in the Philippines who are mothers to children left behind in their hometowns and provinces. The qualitative approach study made use of the parenting competency model and interpretivist paradigm as the guiding framework, and thematic analysis for the data analysis.