When Your Parent Went Abroad: Growing Up in a Family Split Across Countries

He left when you were four. You know his voice from phone calls and his face from a screen, and when he comes home every two or three years there is a fortnight of intense, slightly awkward closeness before he goes again. People tell you how lucky you are — the house, the school fees, the opportunities. And you are grateful. You are also carrying something you have never quite had words for.

This is an ordinary Nepali childhood. Labour migration shapes an enormous number of families here, and the children in them grow up with a particular kind of absence: not abandonment, not bereavement, but a parent who is present in every practical sense and absent in every daily one.

What the research actually found — and why it is reassuring

A school-based study of 724 adolescents in Pokhara compared young people whose parents had migrated with those whose had not. The headline finding surprised many people: parental migration status did not, by itself, significantly affect adolescents' overall psychological wellbeing.

That deserves emphasis, because the public conversation often assumes damage is automatic. It is not. Having a parent abroad is not, in and of itself, a predictor of poor mental health.

What the same study did find mattered a great deal. Higher levels of social support — from family, relatives and teachers — and participation in extracurricular activities were associated with better wellbeing. Exposure to violence, feeling unsafe within the family, witnessing frightening behaviour due to substance use, and mistreatment by siblings were all associated with worse wellbeing.

And specifically for adolescents whose parents had migrated: more frequent and longer communication with the absent parent, and discussing life difficulties during that communication, were associated with better psychological outcomes.

In other words the question is not whether a parent left. It is what the child was surrounded by afterwards, and what the conversations were actually like.

What this looks like from the inside

None of the following are disorders. They are common experiences among young people in split families, and naming them tends to help.

Gratitude that leaves no room for anything else

You know what the separation bought. That knowledge can make any sadness feel illegitimate — as though missing your father is an insult to the work he did. So the sadness gets suppressed rather than felt, and suppressed feelings do not disappear; they leak out sideways as irritability or numbness.

The reunion that is harder than the absence

Many young people find the visits more difficult than the distance. A parent returns with an outdated picture of who you are, tries to resume authority they have not exercised daily, and leaves before anyone has adjusted. Then it resets. Several cycles of this can make closeness itself feel unsafe.

Becoming an adult early

With one parent abroad, the eldest child often absorbs responsibilities — translating documents, managing money, supporting a mother who has no one else to talk to. This builds real competence. It also means some childhood was skipped, and that absence tends to surface later, often in the twenties.

Grief with no event

Nobody died. There is no funeral, no acknowledged loss, no permission to mourn. But something was genuinely lost, repeatedly, over years — and loss without an event is unusually hard to process because nothing in the culture marks it.

For young people in this situation

• Both things can be true: you can be grateful for the sacrifice and sad about the cost. Gratitude does not cancel grief.
• If you can, make calls about something other than results and money. The research points to conversations where difficulties are actually discussed — that specific quality matters.
• Keep the people around you close. Support from relatives and teachers showed up as genuinely protective.
• Stay involved in something outside home and school — sport, music, a group. This was associated with better wellbeing, not merely with being busy.
• If home does not feel safe — violence, substance use, being mistreated — that is the thing to tell someone about, and it matters more than the migration itself.

For the parent who is abroad

• Call more often and for longer, even when there is nothing to report. Frequency and duration both showed up in the findings.
• Ask about difficulties rather than only achievements. A child who can bring problems to you is measurably better off than one who only reports good news.
• Do not spend the whole visit correcting. A fortnight of discipline after two years away teaches a child that your return is something to endure.
• Accept that your picture of them is out of date, and let them update it.

For the parent who stayed

You are carrying the household alone while people describe your family as fortunate. That is a specific and largely unacknowledged strain. Your own wellbeing is not a side issue here — the research points to family support and family safety as central to how children fare, and you cannot generate either from an empty tank.

Also read: Family therapy in Nepal →

When to talk to someone

Consider it if a young person's grades or attendance have changed markedly, if they have withdrawn from friends, if anger has become the main way feelings appear, if sleep or appetite have shifted for weeks, or if reunions have become distressing enough that the child dreads them. Also consider it, as an adult, if you recognise yourself in this article — a good deal of this arrives late, in the twenties and thirties.

The honest version

Growing up with a parent abroad does not damage you automatically. The evidence from Nepali adolescents is genuinely more hopeful than the folklore: what protects young people is support around them, safety at home, involvement in something they care about, and real conversations with the parent who is away.

If some of those were missing in your childhood, that is worth talking through — not because you are broken, but because the thing you were never given permission to call a loss usually turns out to be one.