Long Distance Relationships: Children and Migration in Contemporary Bulgaria
Long Distance Relationships: Children and Migration in Contemporary Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: The article investigates aspects of the everyday lives and strategies of Bulgarian children left behind by their migrant parents. It relies on an ethnographic study conducted in two Bulgarian cities and adopts a child-centered approach that builds on the narratives of children and their interpretations of the meaning of commitment at a distance and care from afar. In an attempt to illuminate the wider effects of migration on the home society, the article focuses on individuals who are not themselves migrants, but whose everyday lives and strategies are deeply influenced by the migration of others – parents, relatives or friends. Challenging the increasingly dominant view of Bulgarian children left behind as passive victims of parental migration, the paper shows these children as social agents who are actively involved in the renegotiation of family roles and inter-generational relations at home as well as of their subjectivities. It demonstrates that parental migration has resuscitated largely forgotten models of familial arrangements and adulthood, which is by no means a conservative tendency, as it happens within a framework of complex transposition and management of transnational relations. The article emphasizes left-behind children’s ability not only to forge and maintain connections at a distance, but also to export and transfer social bonding developed in the home country across state borders.

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