The psychosocial wellbeing of the children of return migrants: the case of Latvia

This thesis is about return migration to Latvia and, specifically, the experiences of second-generation school-age children taken back to their parental homeland as part of family return. Children are often ‘invisible’ in studies of return migration; moreover, their return is seen as ‘psychologically safe’ since they are with their families, who are relocating to a ‘known’ environment. For the children, however, these assumptions need challenging, especially if they are born abroad, since their knowledge of their parents’ homeland may be extremely limited. Furthermore, their agency and voice in the return decision need to be unveiled.

Based on a multi-method investigation which combines a large online survey of emigrant and returnee parents with in-depth interviews with children, parents, teachers and key informants, the thesis addresses three main research questions which focus on the psychosocial wellbeing of returnee families and, especially, children.

1. What factors influence the psychosocial wellbeing of children in the return-migrant family sphere?

2. What are the experiences of return-migrant children in the Latvian school system?

3. How are returnee children impacted by the broader social environment of their parental home country, including friendship and peer groups, the neighbourhood in which the family settles and the wider national system of values?

Conceptually, the thesis draws inspiration from Bronfenbrenner’s multi-level ecological systems theory, originally formulated to investigate the social development of children. My study is one of the few to apply the Bronfenbrenner schema to a migration setting and the first to use it in a study of return-migrating children.

In the three main empirical results chapters, the first investigates the macrosystem, the larger political, economic, social and cultural context of returnee families’ and children’s lives, dominated by the survival of ‘Soviet’ values as well as attempts to develop reintegration policies for returning Latvian families and children. Next comes a chapter devoted to the exosystem, which includes lower-level or meso-scale settings that the children may not be directly in contact with, yet which can still influence their wellbeing and development – examples are neighbourhood relations, the roles of local return-migration coordinators and school administrators and the working schedules of parents, dependent in turn on their labour-market integration. The third and arguably most important empirical chapter focuses on the microsystem – the environment that the child directly engages with and with which he or she regularly interacts and participates. Key here are the family, school and peer-group spheres. Within the school setting, the attitude of teachers is a key variable, along with the child’s knowledge of the Latvian language; both can either facilitate or hamper academic progress and integration into school.

Underlying Bronfenbrenner’s interacting multi-level systems is the chronosystem – a series of time-dependent phenomena ranging from important historical events such as Latvia’s accession to the EU which opened up a wide space of migration opportunities, the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020–2021 Covid-19 pandemic, to life-stage, biographical and demographic variables such as the gender and age of the child, the length of the period spent abroad, the age and timing of the return, the family structure and so on.

In sum, the research findings expose the variety of factors that can potentially influence the psychosocial wellbeing of children relocating to the parental homeland. The thesis closes with recommendations for improving policies of assistance to returning families and children.