Poster #100 - Effects of Mexican parental migration on remaining children’s academic progress and attainment

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

In Mexico, parents conduct labor migration to improve the economic conditions of their sending-site household. This historical trend rose steadily in the 1990’s and peaked early in the 21st century during The Great Mexican Emigration. At the same time, the drop out rate in Mexico increased by more than 25 percentage points compared to 1990 levels (Kattan & Székely, 2015). Using rational-choice models, economists concluded that material benefits afforded by remittances from low-skilled labor led migrant households to undervalue school completion relative to early labor market entry (McKenzie & Rapoport, 2004). While these findings explain the decision to leave school, they cannot account for changes in remaining children’s developmental trajectory that potentially lowered attainment via changes in school engagement and performance.

Beyond market incentives, parental migration might induce school drop out by increasing the socioemotional and psychological cost of learning. Ethnographies (Abrego, 2014; Artico, 2003) and qualitative studies (Suarez-Orozco, Bang, & Kim, 2011; Dreby, 2010; Falicov, 2007) show that remaining children experience trauma from ambiguous loss and develop problematic attachment styles associated with learning-adverse behavioral and psychological traits (Bowlby, 1973; Boss, 1999; Walter & McCoyd, 2009). These detrimental effects are exacerbated by the redistribution of non-academic responsibilities to remaining family members and deficits in parental support following migration (Graham & Jordan, 2011). Thus, as education costs and the relative benefits of early labor-market rise, higher drop out rates may be driven as much by financial considerations as by low estimations of one’s capacity to learn and finish school following parental migration.

This research explores the moderating and mediating effects of grade repetition on the relationship between parental migration and school drop out. These analyses use the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), a three-wave longitudinal study containing education and migration histories of all household members in 2002 and concluding in 2011 (Teruel, Rubalcava, & Arenas, 2012). Table 1 presents enrollment and grade repetition counts for all school-aged children at the time of implementation and Table 2 presents attendance information.

The analyses use propensity score matching methods and logistic regressions to examine the association between parental migration and grade repetition and whether the relationship between grade repetition and drop out depends on parental migration status. An innovative mediation method for propensity score-based stratification will be used in which random draws with replacement from the migrant group are used to construct a control group with similar distribution of grade repetition. The difference between these groups provides stratum-specific indirect effects of parent migration on drop-out risk. This research and methods contribute to literature showing relationships between parental migration and drop out risk (Nobles, 2011; McKenzie & Rapaport, 2010) and the predictive power of grade repetition on drop out risk (Raudenbush & Hong, 2017). Assuming grade repetition is a developmental indicator, findings from this research will determine whether parental migration causes developmental challenges and the extent to which these predict drop-out risk. The analyses will be completed by the end of 2022 and a write-up of results will be available in early 2023.

Author

• Johan Luiz Rocha, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author