The Strangers Who Share Your Name
Inside the OFW Family Breakdown: What Happens When Parents and Children Become Foreigners to Each Other
She left when he was four years old. He is twenty-six now. In between, there were weekly phone calls that grew monthly, then occasional. There were video calls where she asked about school and he gave one-word answers. There were balikbayan boxes filled with toys he outgrew before they arrived. There were seventeen years of absence that no amount of money could fill.
When she finally came home for good, she expected reunion. She expected gratitude. She expected to resume the role of mother that she had never stopped feeling, even across ten thousand kilometers of ocean.
What she found was a stranger. A grown man who called her “Ma” out of obligation but looked at her with the eyes of someone meeting a distant relative. A son who had learned to live without her and did not know how to live with her. A relationship that existed in legal documents and blood but not in the daily intimacy that makes family real.
She cried every night for the first three months. He did not know what to do with her tears. He had stopped crying for her when he was eight years old.
“I sacrificed everything for him,” she said. “I gave up my life so he could have a better one. And now he looks at me like I’m a guest in my own house.”
“She wants me to love her like a mother,” he said. “But I already have a mother. My lola raised me. She was there for everything. How can I feel for someone who wasn’t there what I feel for someone who was?”
Her name is Corazon. His name is Miguel. They live in the same house now. They share meals. They share a last name. They do not share twenty-two years of daily life, and that absence has created a distance that may never close.
This is the story that statistics do not capture. The Philippines celebrates its overseas workers as heroes, counts their remittances as economic triumph, builds policies around their deployment. But behind the ₱2.2 trillion in annual remittances are millions of families fractured by distance, relationships hollowed by absence, parents and children who became strangers while one party sacrificed for the other.
Approximately 9 million Filipino children are growing up with at least one parent working overseas. When those parents return, what comes back is not the family that existed before departure. What comes back is something new, something fragile, something that must be built from the wreckage of years apart.
This is the OFW family breakdown. This is what happens when love is expressed through money rather than presence. This is the cost that no remittance can repay.
Part 1: The Anatomy of Separation
How Families Come Apart
The separation of OFW families follows patterns shaped by economics, opportunity, and the brutal mathematics of global labor markets.
The departure decision:
For most OFW parents, the decision to leave is not experienced as abandonment. It is experienced as sacrifice. The logic is clear: overseas work pays multiples of domestic wages. The money will fund education, build homes, secure futures. The separation is temporary. The benefits are permanent. The sacrifice is worthwhile.
This logic is not wrong. Overseas work does transform family economics. OFW children do have better educational access, better nutrition, better material conditions than they would without remittances.
But the logic is incomplete. It accounts for what money provides. It does not account for what absence takes.
The departure timing:
When parents leave matters enormously for child development:
Infancy (0 to 2 years): Separation during this period disrupts primary attachment formation. Children may struggle to form secure attachments throughout life. The mother who leaves an infant may return to find a child who does not recognize her as mother in any emotional sense.
Early childhood (3 to 6 years): Children at this stage understand absence but not its reasons. They experience departure as abandonment regardless of explanation. Magical thinking leads them to believe they caused the departure or could prevent it through behavior.
Middle childhood (7 to 12 years): Children can intellectually understand economic rationales but still experience emotional impact. This is often when anger emerges, when children begin to resent the parent who “chose” work over them.
Adolescence (13 to 18 years): Teenagers navigating identity formation without parental presence may develop in ways parents cannot influence or understand. By the time parents return, children have become adults shaped by experiences parents did not witness.
The absence structure:
OFW absence is not like other forms of separation. It has specific characteristics that intensify family impact:
Duration: Standard OFW contracts run one to two years, but many workers deploy repeatedly for decades. A parent who works abroad from a child’s age four to age eighteen has been absent for the entirety of the child’s formative development.
Distance: Unlike domestic work that allows weekend visits, overseas work involves thousands of kilometers and expensive travel. Visits may occur once a year or less, for periods too short to rebuild relationships.
Communication limitations: Despite technology improvements, communication across time zones is difficult. A parent working in the Middle East is awake when Philippine children sleep. Video calls happen at awkward hours, when one party is exhausted and the other is just waking.
Economic dependency: The family depends on the absent parent’s continued employment. This dependency creates pressure not to disrupt the arrangement. Children may suppress complaints that could cause the parent to return, ending the income that funds their lives.
The Caregiving Vacuum
When parents leave, someone must care for children. The quality and consistency of this substitute care shapes outcomes profoundly.
Caregiving arrangements:
Father remains: When mothers migrate, fathers often become primary caregivers. Many Filipino fathers are unprepared for this role. Traditional gender expectations mean they may have limited experience with daily childcare. Some rise to the challenge; others struggle or delegate to extended family.
Mother remains: When fathers migrate, mothers typically continue primary caregiving. This arrangement is more aligned with traditional expectations but creates its own stresses. Single parenting is exhausting. Financial management of remittances falls on the remaining parent.
Grandparents: Extremely common arrangement, especially when both parents work abroad or when the remaining parent cannot manage alone. Grandparents provide love and stability but may be elderly, have health limitations, or struggle with generational differences in child-rearing.
Other relatives: Aunts, uncles, older siblings, or other family members may assume caregiving. These arrangements vary enormously in quality and commitment.
Rotating care: Some children move between caregivers, staying with grandmother for a period, then aunt, then another relative. This instability compounds the trauma of parental absence.
Caregiving quality factors:
Research identifies factors that predict whether substitute caregiving produces acceptable or poor outcomes:
Stability: Children who remain with one consistent caregiver fare better than those who move between caregivers.
Caregiver capacity: Caregivers who are physically capable, emotionally available, and financially supported provide better care.
Family communication: Arrangements where the absent parent remains involved in decisions and maintains regular contact produce better outcomes.
Child age: Older children are generally more resilient to caregiver transitions than younger children.
Caregiver relationship: Children cared for by people they knew before parental departure adjust better than those placed with unfamiliar relatives.
The Communication Gap
OFW families depend on communication technology to maintain relationships across distance. But technology has limitations that shape family dynamics.
Communication patterns:
Studies of OFW family communication reveal common patterns:
High initial frequency: Communication is often frequent immediately after departure, as families adjust and maintain connection.
Gradual decline: Over months and years, communication frequency typically decreases. Calls become routine rather than meaningful. Conversations become superficial.
Crisis spikes: Communication increases around problems. Parents call when children are sick, when school issues arise, when emergencies occur. This creates association between communication and problems.
Occasion focus: Calls concentrate around birthdays, holidays, and special events. The daily communication that builds intimacy is absent.
Communication content:
What OFW families talk about shapes relationship quality:
Monitoring focus: Parents often focus calls on monitoring. “How are your grades? Are you behaving? Did you eat?” These questions serve parental anxiety but do not build connection.
Financial focus: Discussions about money dominate many calls. What was sent, what was received, what is needed. Money becomes the primary topic of conversation.
Absent emotional processing: Families often avoid discussing the emotional impact of separation. Expressing sadness or anger feels like criticism of the absent parent’s sacrifice. Feelings go unspoken.
Superficial reporting: Children learn to report what parents want to hear. “School is fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine.” Real struggles go unmentioned.
The video call illusion:
Video technology creates the appearance of presence without its substance:
Seeing is not being: Parents see children on screens but cannot hold them, comfort them physically, or be present for daily moments.
Performance pressure: Video calls become performances. Children present the version of themselves they think parents want to see. Parents present optimistic faces despite workplace struggles.
Technical barriers: Poor connectivity, device limitations, and time zone challenges make video calls frustrating experiences rather than connecting ones.
Visual change shock: Children’s physical development between calls can shock parents. “I did not recognize my own daughter” is a common parental experience.
Part 2: The Children’s Experience
Developmental Impacts
Children of OFWs experience parental absence during critical developmental periods. The impacts vary by age but accumulate over time.
Attachment disruption:
Attachment theory identifies the parent or child bond formed in early years as foundational for later relationships. Disruption during critical periods produces lasting effects:
Anxious attachment: Children who experience parental departure may develop anxious attachment styles. They fear abandonment in relationships, require constant reassurance, and struggle with trust.
Avoidant attachment: Some children respond to absence by suppressing attachment needs. They become emotionally self-reliant, distant in relationships, uncomfortable with intimacy.
Disorganized attachment: The most severe pattern, where children show contradictory attachment behaviors. They may desperately want parental connection while simultaneously fearing or rejecting it.
These attachment patterns persist into adulthood, affecting romantic relationships, friendships, and eventually how these children parent their own children.
Identity formation:
Adolescent identity development requires interaction with parents who provide models, feedback, and boundaries. Absent parents cannot perform these functions:
Unclear identity: Children may struggle to answer “who am I” when a defining relationship exists only through screens and remittances.
Parent idealization or rejection: Without daily reality, children may construct idealized images of absent parents. Or they may reject parents entirely, defining themselves in opposition.
Confused values: Children absorb values from those present. When caregivers’ values differ from parents’ values, children face conflicting guidance.
Educational impacts:
Despite better resources, OFW children often show academic inconsistency:
Motivation challenges: Without parental supervision and encouragement, some children lose academic motivation. Others become driven achievers, trying to justify parental sacrifice.
Behavioral issues: Acting out in school is common, particularly among boys with absent fathers. Behavioral issues may reflect emotional distress that cannot be expressed directly.
Achievement pressure: Many OFW children feel intense pressure to succeed academically. Parental sacrifice creates a debt that academic achievement is supposed to repay. This pressure can become overwhelming.
Emotional and psychological impacts:
Research consistently identifies elevated psychological distress among OFW children:
Depression: Rates of depressive symptoms are significantly higher among children of OFWs than among children in intact families.
Anxiety: Separation anxiety, generalized anxiety, and social anxiety are all elevated.
Anger: Anger at the absent parent, at the situation, at the unfairness of their circumstances. This anger may be suppressed (appearing as depression) or expressed (appearing as behavioral problems).
Loneliness: A pervasive sense of being alone despite caregivers’ presence. “I have people around me but I still feel like nobody really knows me.”
The Emotional Journey
Children of OFWs typically traverse an emotional journey as they grow up with absence:
Stage 1: Acute grief (first months to first year)
The immediate aftermath of departure is characterized by grief reactions:
Crying and distress: Especially in young children, visible distress at parental absence.
Searching behavior: Children may look for the absent parent, ask repeatedly when they will return, expect them to appear.
Sleep and appetite disruption: Physical manifestations of emotional distress.
Regression: Younger children may regress in development. Toilet training may reverse. Speech may simplify.
Stage 2: Adaptation (years one to three)
Children gradually adapt to the new normal:
Routine establishment: Life continues. School, activities, daily rhythms provide structure.
Attachment transfer: Children form or strengthen attachments to present caregivers.
Communication normalization: Calls and messages become routine rather than emotionally charged.
Suppression: Active grief subsides, but underlying feelings may be suppressed rather than resolved.
Stage 3: Ambivalence (ongoing)
As children grow, they develop complex, ambivalent feelings:
Gratitude and resentment: Simultaneous appreciation for parental sacrifice and anger at parental absence. These contradictory feelings create internal conflict.
Loyalty conflicts: Children may feel torn between absent parents and present caregivers. Loving one feels like betraying the other.
Identity questions: “Would I be different if my parent had stayed? Who would I be? Who would we be as a family?”
Stage 4: Resolution or continuation (adolescence to adulthood)
As children mature, they either resolve or continue carrying these dynamics:
Healthy resolution: Some individuals integrate the experience, understanding parental choices while acknowledging their own feelings. They build relationships with parents despite history.
Ongoing estrangement: Others cannot bridge the gap. The absent parent remains emotionally distant even when physically present. The relationship never becomes what either party hoped.
Complex continuation: Most fall somewhere between. Relationships exist but with undercurrents of unresolved feeling. Interactions carry weight that neither party fully acknowledges.
Children’s Voices
Anna, 19, Isabela (mother in Hong Kong since age 3)
“I don’t remember my mother leaving. My earliest memory is my lola telling me that mama was in Hong Kong working so I could go to good school.
“When I was little, I would tell my classmates that my mother lived in Hong Kong. I thought it was special, like having a parent who was a celebrity. I did not understand what it meant.
“As I got older, I started to feel the absence. My classmates had mothers who came to school events. My lola came, but it was not the same. I would see mothers hugging their children, and I would feel something I could not name.
“We talked every week on video call. But what do you say to someone you do not really know? I would tell her about school. She would tell me she missed me. Then we would run out of things to say.
“The boxes were the best part. Opening a balikbayan box felt like Christmas. I would look at each item and try to imagine my mother buying it, thinking of me. That felt more real than the phone calls.
“When I was fifteen, I went through a phase where I was angry all the time. Angry at my mother for leaving. Angry at my lola for not being my mother. Angry at myself for being angry when I knew my mother was sacrificing for me.
“My mother retired last year. She came home. I thought I would feel complete. Instead, I feel awkward. We live in the same house, but I do not know how to talk to her. She wants to be my mother, but I already learned how to live without a mother.
“I love her. I know I love her. But I do not know how to show it, and I do not think she knows how to receive it. Sixteen years of absence created something between us. I do not know what to call it. It is not hate. It is something else. It is the shape of missing.”
Carlos, 24, Negros Occidental (both parents in Dubai since age 6)
“Both my parents left. My father first, then my mother a year later. I was raised by my grandmother and my aunt.
“They sent money for everything. Good school, good clothes, computer, phone. I had more stuff than most of my classmates. Everyone thought I was lucky.
“I did not feel lucky. I felt like an orphan with living parents. An orphan who got video calls instead of bedtime stories.
“My parents would visit every two years. For one month, they would try to be parents. They would take me places, buy me things, try to fit two years of parenting into thirty days. Then they would leave again, and I would readjust to their absence.
“By the time I was a teenager, I had stopped adjusting. I just waited for them to leave so life could go back to normal. Is that terrible to say? Their visits were disruptions. Their absence was my normal.
“I am an engineer now. I graduated top of my class. My parents paid for everything. I owe them my education, my career, my future.
“But I do not know them. When they call, we talk about practical things. Work, health, news. We do not talk about feelings. We never learned how.
“They are coming home next year, permanently. My father is sixty-two. They want to retire here, live with family, enjoy grandchildren when I have them.
“I do not know how I feel about it. Part of me wants them here. Part of me is afraid. We have never lived together as a family. I do not know if we can.
“My therapist says I have attachment issues. She says I struggle with intimacy because I never learned it from my parents. She is probably right.
“I am going to try with them. I am going to try to build something. But I am building with strangers. We share blood and nothing else.”
Part 3: The Parents’ Experience
The Departure Burden
OFW parents carry psychological burdens that are often invisible to those they leave behind.
The guilt:
Parental guilt is pervasive and persistent:
Departure guilt: The moment of leaving creates guilt that never fully fades. Parents remember children crying at the airport, remember waving goodbye, remember the physical sensation of walking away.
Milestone guilt: Missing birthdays, graduations, first communions, school events. Each missed milestone adds to accumulated guilt.
Daily absence guilt: Not being there for ordinary moments. Not comforting a sick child. Not helping with homework. Not being present for the unremarkable days that constitute childhood.
Compensation guilt: Guilt about trying to compensate through money. Awareness that gifts and remittances cannot replace presence creates guilt about the substitution itself.
The grief:
OFW parents experience grief, though it is rarely named as such:
Anticipatory grief: Before departure, grief for the life that is about to be left behind.
Ongoing grief: Continuous, low-level grief that persists throughout deployment. Missing children is a constant state, not an occasional feeling.
Developmental grief: Grief at missing children’s development. “I left a baby and came back to find a child. I left a child and came back to find a teenager. I left a teenager and came back to find an adult. I missed everything.”
Relationship grief: Grief at the relationship that could have existed but did not. The parent-child bond that daily presence would have built.
The sacrifice narrative:
To cope with guilt and grief, OFW parents construct sacrifice narratives:
Noble sacrifice: “I am doing this for my family. My suffering is meaningful because it provides for them.”
Temporary framing: “This is temporary. I will return. We will be together again.”
Outcome focus: “When my children graduate, when the house is built, when we have savings, it will all be worth it.”
These narratives are psychologically necessary. They make the unbearable bearable. But they can also prevent honest processing of loss and create expectations that reunion will somehow resolve years of absence.
The Abroad Experience
Life abroad for OFW parents involves specific challenges that compound family separation stress.
Workplace conditions:
Many OFWs work in demanding conditions:
Long hours: Twelve-hour shifts, six-day weeks are common. Little time remains for communication with family.
Physical demands: Construction, domestic work, healthcare involve physical labor that leaves workers exhausted.
Isolation: Workers may be isolated in compounds, private homes, or remote worksites with limited outside contact.
Employer control: For domestic workers especially, employers may restrict phone use, limit days off, and control communication.
Living conditions:
Overseas living often involves:
Crowded accommodation: Workers may share rooms with multiple others, providing no privacy for emotional phone calls.
Limited personal space: No space that feels like home, no place to relax or grieve privately.
Surveillance: Some workers are monitored, making honest communication with family difficult.
Support absence:
Workers are separated from support systems:
No family support: The family that would normally provide emotional support is precisely what is missing.
Limited social support: Fellow workers provide some support, but relationships are transient and constrained.
Cultural isolation: Living in foreign cultures without language skills or cultural familiarity is isolating.
Professional support absence: Mental health services are rarely available or accessible for OFWs.
Coping mechanisms:
OFWs develop various coping mechanisms, some healthy and some not:
Work focus: Immersing in work to avoid thinking about family absence.
Future orientation: Focusing on future reunion rather than present separation.
Remittance focus: Deriving meaning from the money being sent, the things being provided.
Religion: Faith provides comfort and meaning for many OFWs.
Unhealthy coping: Some turn to alcohol, gambling, or extramarital relationships to manage emotional pain.
Parents’ Voices
Rosario, 54, Nueva Ecija (returned from Singapore after 18 years)
“I left when my youngest was two and my oldest was eight. I came home when they were twenty and twenty-six. I missed everything.
“In Singapore, I worked as a domestic helper. I cared for other people’s children while my own children grew up without me. The irony never escaped me.
“The family I worked for was good to me. I watched their children grow up. I was there for their first words, their first steps, their school problems, their teenage dramas. I gave them what I could not give my own children.
“At night, when the house was quiet, I would look at photos of my children and cry. Not loudly. You learn to cry silently when you share a room. But the tears came every night for years.
“I called home twice a week. What do you say in a phone call? How do you parent through a screen? I would ask about school, about health, about their lives. They would give me short answers. I could feel them pulling away, year by year.
“The hardest part was visits. Every two years, I would come home for a month. At first, my children were excited. They would run to me at the airport. But as they got older, the excitement faded. By the time they were teenagers, my visits felt like interruptions in their real lives.
“I retired three years ago. I thought coming home would fix everything. I thought we would finally be a family.
“It does not work that way. You cannot pick up where you left off when there is nowhere to pick up from. My children are strangers who call me ‘Mama.’ They are polite. They are grateful. They are not close.
“I have money. I have a house. My children have educations. On paper, my sacrifice was successful. But I would give everything, all of it, for the years I lost. I would give everything to have raised my own children.
“That is the choice I made. I cannot unmake it. I live with it every day.”
Roberto, 58, Iloilo (returned from Saudi Arabia after 22 years)
“I was a young father when I left. Twenty-six years old with a two-year-old son. I told my wife I would work for five years, save money, come home and build something.
“Five years became ten. Ten became fifteen. Fifteen became twenty-two. Each time I planned to return, something happened. Another contract, better pay, another opportunity. And always, the thought: one more year and I can really set us up.
“My son grew up without me. I watched it happen through photos and phone calls. Baby became toddler became child became teenager became man. All of it at a distance.
“I tried to be a father from Saudi. I would call with advice, try to guide him, try to discipline. But how can you discipline a child who does not know you? How can you guide someone whose daily life you do not see?
“My wife did everything. She raised him, really. I just sent money and called with opinions no one needed.
“When I came home for good, my son was twenty-four. Grown. Finished with college. Already working. He did not need a father anymore. He had done without one for two decades.
“We live in the same house now. We are civil. We watch basketball together sometimes. But we are not close. There is a wall between us that neither of us knows how to take down.
“I built that wall. Twenty-two years of absence, brick by brick. Now I am on one side and he is on the other, and all the money I sent cannot buy a door through.
“Was it worth it? I do not know. My son has a degree, a good job, a future. But he also has a father he does not really know and does not seem to want to know.
“I gave him everything except the one thing he needed. I gave him everything except me.”
Part 4: The Reunion That Is Not
The Return Fantasy
OFW families sustain themselves with fantasies of return. The day when the parent comes home, when the family is reunited, when everything will be okay. This fantasy is psychologically necessary during separation but creates expectations that reality cannot meet.
The parent’s fantasy:
OFW parents imagine return as resolution:
Gratitude: “My children will understand what I sacrificed. They will be grateful.”
Resumption: “We will pick up where we left off. I will be their parent again.”
Closeness: “We will finally be close. The distance will disappear.”
Rest: “I will rest. I will enjoy my family. The hard years will be over.”
The children’s fantasy:
Children imagine return differently:
Completion: “I will finally have a mother or father. The hole in my life will be filled.”
Understanding: “My parent will finally understand me, know me, see who I really am.”
Normalcy: “We will be a normal family like other families.”
Answers: “I will understand why they left. The questions will be answered.”
The fantasy collision:
When return actually happens, fantasies collide with reality:
The stranger problem: Parents return to children they do not know. Children receive parents they do not know. Both parties expected to feel more than they do.
The expectation gap: Parents expect gratitude; children feel entitled to what sacrifice provided. Parents expect closeness; children feel awkward with someone they barely know.
The role confusion: Who is the parent now? Children raised by others have existing authority figures. The returned parent has biological status but not relationship history.
The space problem: Families have organized around absence. The returned parent must find a place in a system that adapted to their absence.
The Reunion Dynamics
Research and clinical observation identify common dynamics in OFW family reunions:
The honeymoon phase:
Initial reunions often have a honeymoon quality:
Excitement: The family is together. There is celebration, attention, novelty.
Effort: Everyone tries. Parents try to reconnect. Children try to welcome. There is conscious effort to make it work.
Superficiality: Interactions may be warm but shallow. The hard conversations are postponed. Everyone focuses on the positive.
Duration: This phase typically lasts days to weeks, rarely longer.
The reality phase:
After honeymoon comes reality:
Friction: Daily life reveals differences. Parenting styles clash with established patterns. Routines are disrupted. Conflicts emerge.
Power struggles: The returned parent may try to assert authority. Children and caregivers who managed fine without them may resist.
Disappointment: The reunion is not what anyone imagined. Parents feel unappreciated. Children feel misunderstood. The closeness expected does not materialize.
Comparison: Family members compare reality to fantasy and find reality lacking.
The negotiation phase:
Families must negotiate new relationships:
Role renegotiation: Who does what? Who makes decisions? Who has authority? These must be worked out, often through conflict.
Relationship building: Families must build relationships from wherever they actually are, not from where they imagined they would be.
Grief processing: The lost years must be mourned. This grief was suppressed during separation; reunion brings it to the surface.
Acceptance: Eventually, families must accept what is rather than mourning what could have been.
Possible outcomes:
Reunion trajectories vary:
Successful integration: Some families successfully build new relationships. They accept that the past cannot change, focus on the present and future, and develop genuine connection over time.
Parallel living: Some families live together but not really together. They share space but not intimacy. Relationships remain superficial.
Conflict and estrangement: Some families cannot resolve reunion tensions. Conflict escalates. Family members may separate again, this time by choice rather than economic necessity.
Delayed resolution: Some families take years or decades to work through reunion dynamics. Resolution may come when children have their own families and gain new perspective on parental choices.
Reunion Voices
Marites, 49, Cavite (returned from Kuwait after 15 years)
“I came home to children who did not need me. My daughter was twenty-three, working, independent. My son was nineteen, in college, almost an adult. They had lived without me for fifteen years. They did not know how to live with me.
“The first week was wonderful. They took time off. We went places together. Everyone smiled and laughed and pretended we were a happy family finally reunited.
“Then real life started. My daughter went back to work. My son went back to school. My husband went back to his routine. And I was alone in a house full of people who had lives I was not part of.
“I tried to be a mother. I cooked, cleaned, tried to take care of them. But they had their own ways of doing things. My daughter did not like how I cooked. My son did not want me asking about his schedule. My husband had managed the house for fifteen years and did not want my interference.
“I felt like a guest who had overstayed her welcome. In my own house, with my own family.
“We had a fight, maybe three months after I returned. My daughter said something like ‘You weren’t here when I needed you, and now you want to tell me what to do?’ It was not mean. It was just true. And it broke something in me.
“We are better now. Three years later. We have found a balance. I am part of the family but not the center of it. I have accepted that I cannot recover the years I lost.
“What I tell other OFWs planning to return: lower your expectations. Your family moved on without you. They had to. When you come back, you are not returning to the family you left. You are meeting a new family that grew from the one you left.”
Teodoro, 61, Pampanga (returned from UAE after 25 years)
“Twenty-five years. I left when my son was three and my daughter was one. I came home when they were twenty-eight and twenty-six. Grown adults with their own lives, their own families, their own everything.
“My son has a child now. My grandchild. I see them every week. But there is something between me and my son, some barrier neither of us can name.
“When I try to give him advice, he listens politely and does what he was going to do anyway. When I try to help with the grandchild, my son and his wife have their own ways. I am an outsider trying to belong.
“The hardest moment was when my grandson called me ‘Lolo’ for the first time. I should have felt joy. Instead, I felt grief. Grief for the word ‘Papa’ that I barely heard from my own son, because I was not there to hear it.
“My daughter is kinder, in a way. She includes me, invites me to things, makes effort. But I can see her making effort. It does not flow naturally. It is deliberate kindness, not instinctive love.
“I do not blame them. I blame myself. I chose to stay year after year, always thinking one more contract, one more savings goal. I told myself I was building their future. I was building their future without me in it.
“Now I have money, property, security. And I have children who are strangers, grandchildren I am learning to know, and the knowledge that I traded presence for provision and the trade was not fair.
“If I could tell my younger self anything, I would say: come home. Come home early. Come home poor if you have to. The money means nothing if you lose your family to get it.”
Part 5: The Relationship Wreckage
Marriages Under Strain
OFW separation devastates not only parent-child relationships but also marriages. The physical absence, the communication challenges, and the divergent growth paths create marital stress that many relationships cannot survive.
The distance dynamics:
Separated couples face specific challenges:
Intimacy erosion: Physical intimacy is impossible across distance. Emotional intimacy requires effort that exhausted workers may not sustain.
Divergent experiences: Partners live completely different lives. The OFW spouse navigates foreign cultures and workplace stress. The home spouse manages household and children. They have less and less in common.
Communication limitations: Important conversations cannot happen naturally. Issues accumulate between calls. Small problems become big problems without daily processing.
Decision-making conflict: Decisions must be made. The home spouse makes them. The OFW spouse may disagree but is not there to participate. Resentment builds on both sides.
Common marital issues:
Trust erosion: Distance creates space for suspicion. Either partner may worry about infidelity. These worries may be justified or may be paranoia. Without presence, verification is impossible.
Financial conflict: Money is the purpose of separation but also a source of conflict. Disagreements about spending, saving, remittance amounts, and financial priorities create tension.
Parenting conflict: Absent parents may disagree with how present parents are raising children but have limited ability to influence outcomes.
Power imbalance: The earning spouse has economic power. The home spouse has presence power. Neither has full partnership.
Growing apart: People change over time. Couples who are separated cannot change together. They become different people who may no longer fit each other.
Infidelity:
Both OFW spouses and home spouses engage in infidelity at elevated rates:
OFW infidelity: Lonely, far from spouse, surrounded by similarly lonely workers. Affairs with co-workers, with locals, with others in similar situations.
Home spouse infidelity: Lonely, managing everything alone, spouse absent for years. Affairs with neighbors, with co-workers, with anyone who provides the presence and intimacy the absent spouse cannot.
Precise infidelity rates are unknown, but studies suggest significantly elevated rates in transnational families. Affairs discovered during deployment or upon return are frequent triggers for marital breakdown.
Marital outcomes:
OFW marriages follow several trajectories:
Survival: Some marriages survive separation. Couples maintain connection, navigate challenges, and reunite successfully. These tend to be couples with strong pre-departure relationships, good communication, and shorter separation periods.
Formal dissolution: Some marriages end in annulment or legal separation. The Philippines does not have divorce, so formal ending requires lengthy legal processes. Many couples pursue this when infidelity or irreconcilable differences make continuation impossible.
Informal separation: Many marriages end informally. Couples stop considering themselves married but do not pursue legal dissolution. The OFW may start a new family abroad. The home spouse may form new relationships. The legal marriage persists while the actual marriage is over.
Damaged continuation: Some marriages continue but are damaged. Couples remain together but with unresolved issues, resentment, and emotional distance. They are married but not partners.
The Secondary Relationship Casualties
Beyond immediate family, OFW separation damages extended relationships:
Extended family strain:
Caregiver burden: Grandparents and other relatives who care for OFW children bear significant burden. This can create resentment, especially if caregiving is inadequately compensated or appreciated.
Financial expectations: Extended family may expect financial benefits from OFW success. When expectations are not met, relationships sour.
Interference conflict: Extended family involved in caregiving may have opinions about how children should be raised, how money should be spent, how the OFW marriage should be managed. This interference creates conflict.
Friendship erosion:
Shared experience absence: Friendships depend on shared experiences. OFWs no longer share daily life with hometown friends. Connections weaken.
Status changes: OFW financial success may create status differences that strain friendships. Those who stayed may feel inferior. Those who left may feel envied or resented.
Life stage divergence: Friends move through life stages together. OFWs are absent for these transitions. They miss weddings, births, deaths. The shared life that sustains friendship is interrupted.
Community disconnection:
Belonging absence: Communities are built through daily presence. OFWs lose their place in community life. When they return, they must rebuild belonging from scratch.
Re-entry challenges: Returning OFWs often feel like foreigners in their home communities. They have changed. The community has changed. Neither recognizes the other.
Part 6: The Children Who Parent and The Parents Who Cannot
Role Reversal Dynamics
One of the most damaging patterns in OFW families is role reversal, where children assume parental functions and parents become dependent on children.
Parentification:
Parentification occurs when children take on adult responsibilities inappropriate for their age:
Household parentification: Children manage households. They cook, clean, supervise younger siblings, handle finances. They do what absent parents would do.
Emotional parentification: Children provide emotional support to remaining parents or caregivers. They become confidants, counselors, supporters. They carry adult emotional burdens.
Family parentification: Children become family managers. They communicate between absent parents and other family members. They make decisions. They hold the family together.
The parentified child’s experience:
Children who are parentified often:
Lose childhood: They do not get to be children. They carry responsibilities that crowd out play, exploration, and age-appropriate development.
Develop precocious competence: They become capable beyond their years. This looks like maturity but is actually adaptation to abnormal circumstances.
Suppress own needs: Their own needs become secondary to family needs. They learn to not need, not want, not require.
Carry lasting impacts: As adults, parentified children may struggle with boundaries, with allowing others to care for them, with identifying their own needs.
The dependent parent:
When OFW parents return, they may find themselves dependent on children who have become competent adults:
Financial management: Children who managed remittances may continue managing family finances. Parents who earned the money do not control it.
Decision authority: Children who made decisions in parents’ absence may resist ceding authority. Parents find themselves consulting rather than deciding.
Emotional caretaking: Parents who suppressed emotions abroad may need emotional support. Children become caretakers of their own parents.
Role confusion: Neither party knows who should be taking care of whom. Traditional parent-child hierarchy has been disrupted and cannot easily be restored.
The Grandparent Complication
Grandparents who raise OFW children occupy a complex position that shapes family dynamics during and after reunification.
The grandparent-grandchild bond:
When grandparents are primary caregivers, they often become primary attachment figures:
Daily presence: Grandparents are there. They wake children, feed them, take them to school, comfort them when sick. They do what parents do.
Emotional bonding: Children attach to those who care for them. Grandparents become the emotional center.
Authority establishment: Grandparents establish rules, provide discipline, make decisions. They hold parental authority.
The return conflict:
When parents return, they may find themselves in competition with grandparents:
Attachment conflict: Children may be more attached to grandparents than to parents. They may prefer grandparents, turn to grandparents, resist parental bonding.
Authority conflict: Parents want to establish authority. Grandparents have held authority for years. Children do not know whose rules to follow.
Loyalty conflict: Children may feel that bonding with returned parents is disloyal to grandparents who raised them. They may resist parent-child intimacy to protect grandparent relationships.
Grandparent displacement:
Returned parents may displace grandparents from roles they have held for years:
Role loss: Grandparents lose purpose and identity when their caregiving role ends.
Relationship strain: The transition from grandparent-as-parent to grandparent-as-grandparent may be painful for everyone.
Conflict: Grandparents and returned parents may conflict over children, over methods, over authority.
The grandmother’s voice:
Lola Caring, 74, Bohol (raised three grandchildren while both parents worked in Hong Kong):
“I raised them from babies. My daughter left when the oldest was three, the middle was one, and the youngest was three months. I raised them.
“I did not sleep through the night for years. I was already fifty-six when the youngest was born. But I did it. I walked them to school. I helped with homework. I took care of them when they were sick. I did everything a mother does.
“When my daughter came home last year, she wanted to be their mother. But I am their mother. Not by blood, but by everything else. I changed their diapers. I taught them to read. I sat with them when they cried. I was there.
“She resents me, I think. She sees how the children come to me first, how they trust me more, how they are more comfortable with me. It hurts her. I understand. But it is not my fault. I was the one who was here.
“Now we live together, and it is difficult. She wants to make decisions, but the children are used to me making decisions. She wants to set rules, but the children already have rules. She feels like a stranger in her own family.
“I try to step back. I try to let her be the mother. But after twenty years, how do you change everything? The children are grown now anyway. They do not need either of us to make decisions for them.
“I love my daughter. I am proud of what she accomplished. But part of me is angry too. She left me with her children. She left me to do her job. And now she wants that job back, and I am supposed to just hand it over.
“It is not that simple. Nothing in this situation is simple.”
Part 7: The Mental Health Crisis
The Psychological Toll
OFW family separation creates mental health impacts that are widespread but largely unaddressed.
Depression:
Depression affects all parties in OFW families:
OFW depression: Isolation, stress, absence from loved ones, guilt about leaving. Studies suggest depression rates among OFWs significantly exceed general population rates.
Left-behind spouse depression: Single parenting stress, loneliness, economic pressure, relationship uncertainty. Left-behind spouses show elevated depression rates.
Left-behind children depression: Parental absence, attachment disruption, identity challenges. Children of OFWs have depression rates roughly double those of children in intact families.
Caregiver depression: Burden of raising others’ children, often at advanced age, without recognition or adequate support.
Anxiety:
Anxiety manifests across the separation:
Separation anxiety: Especially in younger children, but also in adults. Fear of further loss, of communication cutoff, of bad news.
Generalized anxiety: Persistent worry about distant family members. Health worries, safety worries, relationship worries.
Social anxiety: Difficulty with social situations, especially for children who feel different from peers with intact families.
Post-traumatic symptoms:
While OFW separation does not always meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, it can produce trauma-like symptoms:
Intrusive memories: Recurring memories of departure, of missing events, of painful communications.
Avoidance: Avoiding topics, places, or situations that trigger separation feelings.
Emotional numbing: Suppressing feelings to cope with ongoing loss.
Hypervigilance: Constant monitoring for threats to family connection.
Suicidal ideation:
In severe cases, OFW family separation contributes to suicidal thoughts:
OFW suicide: OFWs experience suicidal ideation at rates exceeding general population. Some complete suicide, often in isolation abroad.
Left-behind children suicide: Adolescents with absent parents show elevated suicide risk. The combination of developmental challenges and family absence creates vulnerability.
The Treatment Gap
Despite widespread mental health impacts, treatment is rare:
Access barriers:
Geographic: Mental health services are concentrated in Metro Manila. Provincial families have limited access.
Financial: Private mental health care is expensive. Public services are limited. OFW families may have money but not access.
Awareness: Many do not recognize that what they experience is treatable. Sadness about family separation seems normal, not clinical.
Cultural barriers:
Stigma: Mental health treatment carries stigma in Philippine culture. Seeking help is seen as weakness.
Religious framing: Mental health issues may be framed religiously rather than clinically. Prayer, faith, and spiritual intervention are preferred over psychological treatment.
Family privacy: Family problems are considered private. Discussing them with outsiders, even professionals, feels inappropriate.
Sacrifice expectation: OFW sacrifice is supposed to produce gratitude, not psychological problems. Acknowledging mental health impacts feels like criticizing the sacrifice.
Structural barriers:
Professional shortage: The Philippines has severe mental health professional shortage. Psychiatrists and psychologists are insufficient for the population.
Policy gaps: Mental health support for OFW families is not systematically provided. Pre-departure orientation touches on mental health briefly if at all. Return and reintegration services focus on economic rather than psychological adjustment.
Research gaps: Limited research specifically addresses OFW family mental health, making evidence-based intervention development difficult.
The Untold Suffering
Because mental health impacts are unaddressed, suffering accumulates silently:
Children suffer without naming their suffering. They think their sadness is normal, their anxiety is personality, their depression is just how they are.
Parents suffer without relief. They carry guilt and grief for years, decades. They do not seek help because they do not know help exists or would not accept it if offered.
Families suffer without processing. The accumulated pain of separation, the wounds of reunion, the ongoing dynamics of damaged relationships go unexamined and unhealed.
Communities suffer without recognition. When millions of families experience similar trauma, the trauma becomes normalized. It is just how life is for OFW families. The abnormality of the situation disappears into its ubiquity.
Part 8: The Path Forward
What Families Can Do
Despite systemic challenges, families have some capacity to mitigate separation damage:
Before departure:
Honest preparation: Discuss separation honestly with children at age-appropriate levels. Do not minimize or avoid the topic.
Attachment groundwork: Strengthen attachment before departure. Create rituals, memories, and connection foundations that can sustain separation.
Care arrangements: Carefully select and prepare caregivers. Ensure children have stable, loving care.
Communication planning: Establish communication patterns before departure. Set expectations for frequency, timing, and content.
Timeline honesty: Be honest about expected duration. Do not promise imminent return that will not happen.
During separation:
Quality communication: Prioritize meaningful conversation over monitoring. Ask about feelings, not just facts. Share experiences, not just instructions.
Consistent presence: Maintain communication consistency. Regular calls create stability even when physical presence is impossible.
Emotional acknowledgment: Acknowledge the difficulty of separation. Allow children (and self) to express negative feelings without guilt or criticism.
Caregiver collaboration: Work with caregivers as partners, not competitors. Support their authority while maintaining parental connection.
Visit quality: During visits, focus on relationship rather than gifts. Be present rather than compensating.
Preparing for return:
Expectation management: Prepare all family members for reunion challenges. No one should expect instant closeness or problem resolution.
Transition planning: Plan the transition. Where will the returning parent fit in household routines? How will roles adjust?
Professional support: Consider family counseling before and during reunification. Professional guidance can help navigate complex dynamics.
Patience commitment: Commit to patience. Reunion takes time. Relationships cannot be rebuilt quickly.
What Support Systems Can Do
External support can help OFW families navigate separation and reunion:
Schools:
Recognition: Train teachers to recognize OFW family dynamics and their impact on students.
Support programs: Establish support groups, counseling access, and peer connection for OFW children.
Communication facilitation: Help facilitate parent-teacher communication despite distance. Include absent parents in educational partnership.
Academic flexibility: Recognize that OFW children face unique challenges. Provide support rather than punishment for academic impacts of family stress.
Churches and communities:
Community support: Provide community support for OFW families. Create networks where families can support each other.
Caregiver support: Recognize and support grandparents and other caregivers. They carry enormous burden with little recognition.
Return integration: Help returning OFWs reintegrate into community life. Facilitate reconnection.
Non-judgment: Create spaces where OFW families can discuss challenges without judgment or stigma.
Healthcare:
Mental health services: Expand mental health service access for OFW families. Train providers in OFW-specific dynamics.
Screening: Screen OFW family members for mental health concerns. Early identification enables early intervention.
Integrated care: Integrate mental health into primary care, where OFW families are more likely to seek help.
Government:
Pre-departure programs: Expand pre-departure orientation to include family preparation, communication strategies, and mental health awareness.
Overseas support: Provide mental health support for OFWs abroad through embassies, online services, and employer partnerships.
Return support: Develop comprehensive return and reintegration support that addresses psychological, not just economic, adjustment.
Research investment: Fund research on OFW family dynamics to support evidence-based policy and intervention.
What Policy Must Change
Systemic change requires policy reform:
Rethinking labor export:
Domestic opportunity creation: The best policy for OFW families is reducing the need for family-separating migration. Domestic economic development that provides decent work at home reduces reliance on overseas employment.
Migration alternatives: Where overseas work continues, explore alternatives to long-term separation. Family accompaniment programs, shorter contract cycles, and regional migration that allows frequent visits.
True cost accounting: Policy should account for the full costs of labor export, including family and mental health impacts. Current policy counts remittances but ignores the human costs that generate them.
Supporting families who migrate:
Communication support: Subsidize communication costs. Reliable, affordable communication should be a right, not a luxury.
Leave policies: Mandate and fund home leave. Workers should be able to visit families regularly, not once in two years.
Family preparation: Require comprehensive family preparation as part of deployment. Families should understand what they face and have tools to cope.
Return support: Provide comprehensive return support. Reunification challenges should be anticipated and addressed, not left to struggling families.
Mental health system:
Capacity building: Dramatically expand mental health service capacity. The shortage of providers leaves millions without access.
OFW-specific services: Develop services specifically for OFW families. Their needs are distinct and require targeted approaches.
Destigmatization: Public education to reduce mental health stigma. Seeking help should be normalized, not shameful.
Insurance coverage: Ensure that OFW insurance and PhilHealth cover mental health services. Financial barriers should not prevent treatment.
Part 9: The Reckoning
What We Owe Them
The Philippines has built its economy on the labor of overseas workers. Remittances fund consumption, stabilize currency, and enable government spending. OFWs are national heroes in official rhetoric, their sacrifices celebrated in speeches and commemorations.
But what do we actually owe to the millions of families who paid for this economic benefit with their relationships, their childhoods, their mental health?
We owe them honesty:
The OFW system is not simply heroic sacrifice rewarded by economic advancement. It is a trade with profound costs that are rarely acknowledged. Families trading years of presence for economic improvement deserve honesty about what that trade entails.
We owe them support:
Families who serve national economic interests through their separation deserve support from the nation that benefits. This support should include mental health services, educational assistance, family counseling, and community resources. The current system takes the labor and remittances while leaving families to manage the damage alone.
We owe them alternatives:
The Philippines should not accept permanent labor export as national destiny. Economic policy should aim to create domestic opportunities that allow families to remain together. The current celebration of OFW remittances as national success ignores the structural failure that makes family separation the best option for millions.
We owe them recognition:
The children who grew up without parents, the spouses who spent years alone, the grandparents who raised grandchildren, the families who fractured and never recovered: these people deserve recognition. Their suffering is not incidental to the OFW story. It is central to it.
The Question That Remains
After all the analysis, after all the stories, after all the recommendations, a question remains:
Is it worth it?
Is the economic benefit of overseas work worth the family cost? Is the house, the education, the improved material life worth the damaged relationships, the estranged children, the marriages that did not survive?
There is no universal answer. For some families, the trade was worth it. The economic transformation changed lives in ways that damaged relationships could not undo. The children, despite attachment wounds, had opportunities they would never have had otherwise. The sacrifice, for all its cost, achieved its purpose.
For other families, the trade was not worth it. The money is gone, spent on daily needs and never accumulated into lasting change. The relationships were the only thing that mattered, and now they are damaged beyond repair. The sacrifice produced nothing but loss.
Most families fall somewhere between. The outcomes are mixed. The money helped. The separation hurt. The children succeeded and also struggle. The relationships survived and are also wounded. Life is better in some ways and worse in others. The trade was not clearly worth it or not worth it. It simply was, and now families must live with its consequences.
What is clear is that the choice is often not really a choice. Families do not choose overseas migration from a menu of equally viable options. They choose it because domestic options are inadequate, because economic necessity leaves no alternative, because the system is designed to export labor rather than create domestic opportunity.
In this sense, asking whether the trade is “worth it” misses the point. Families are not making free choices in a fair market. They are making constrained choices in a system that offers overseas separation as the best bad option.
The Strangers Who Share Your Name
This investigation began with a mother and son who became strangers through seventeen years of separation. It could have begun with millions of similar stories, millions of similar strangers, millions of Filipino families fractured by the economics of global labor.
What the strangers share is a name, a history, a biological connection. What they do not share is the daily intimacy that transforms biological relationship into felt family. That intimacy requires presence. It cannot be sent by wire transfer.
The balikbayan boxes arrive, full of things that cross oceans. The remittances arrive, numbers moving through banking systems. The video calls happen, faces on screens pretending presence.
But the years do not arrive. The years spent apart, the moments missed, the ordinary accumulation of daily life that creates family cannot be boxed, cannot be remitted, cannot be video-called across the distance.
The strangers remain strange to each other. They try to build something from the wreckage. Some succeed. Many do not.
And the system that made them strangers continues. New parents depart. New children are left behind. New separations begin their slow transformation of family into strangers.
The question is not whether this is worth it. The question is whether we can build a world where families do not have to make this choice at all.
Until then, the strangers will multiply. They will share names and blood and nothing else. They will try to reconnect and sometimes fail. They will carry the wounds of separation through generations.
They are the cost of the system. They are what remittances cannot count. They are the truth that celebrations of OFW heroism do not mention.
They are the strangers who share your name. And there are millions of them.