CSPS Seminar on "Ghanaian Stayer Youth Adapting to International Parental Migration"
Many youth in Global South countries grow up without one or both parents due to international migration. In the literature, these youth are called ‘left-behind’ but I prefer the term ‘stayer youth’ to avoid any negative connotations about them. Often, these youth reside in different caregiving arrangements. Research investigating how this affects their life chances or subjective wellbeing is mixed. Building on the limited scholarship about stayer youth’s own experiences and aspirations through a youth-centric approach, I employ the concept of youth mobility trajectories, developed within the Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives project (MO-TRAYL), to show how stayer youth adapt their strategies and aspirations throughout their parent-child separation. With 38 ethnographic accounts from Ghana, I show how stayer youth are agentic based on how they choose to cope with international parental migration at varying moments of separation and resource accessibility within their transnational and local networks, and likewise their personal abilities. By examining and interpreting their adaptation strategies, stayer youth try to align their changing capabilities with their preferred experiences and aspirations.