4 - Boys’ and Girls’ Experiences of Distribution in Striving Families

Summary

Chapter 4 explores the distribution of resources and chores to children by their gender and their perceptions of their family’s distributional practices when their parents had migrated. Chiefly, parents felt obligated to provide sons with money for education and housing, but they only felt obligated to support their daughters’ education.Children realised that their gender impacted on what their parents aimed to provide for them. At the same time, many children perceived inequality in the adults’ everyday treatment of them vis-à-vis their opposite-gender sibling, for instance, in the distribution of food and treats, access to the television remote control, and household chores. Gender inequalities were sometimes also discerned by children in their parents’ decisions about which sibling stayed behind in the countryside and which sibling migrated with the parents. Nevertheless, gender equality in child-raising practices were also evident, including in investment in children’s education and even in the amount of pocket money boys and girls received, as well as in the children’s receipt of gifts from migrant parents. But even as left-behind children benefited from wider processes favouring gender equality, the effects unfolded unevenly across localities, families, and individuals such that boys’ and girls’ experiences of being left-behind varied.