- Amna Nawaz:The number of households where grandchildren are being raised by grandparents has been on the rise for decades in lower and middle-income countries. Parents have moved abroad or into urban areas for job opportunities and higher wages, in part because agricultural jobs no longer provide a reliable income due to climate change.Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro looks at one program in rural Thailand aimed at keeping families together by providing alternative sources of income. It’s part of Fred’s series Agents For Change.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:In millions of households across rural Thailand, this is what the dinner hour looks like, grandma and grandpa feeding the little ones, mom and dad nowhere in the picture.
- Pramai Luersuebchart, Grandfather (through interpreter):Every day, I fetch food for the two kids, and I take the children to and from school.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:At 74, Pramai Luersuebchart says he has little choice raising his grandchildren, 3 and 7, left in his care while his daughter works in the capital, Bangkok.Aside from a couple of visits a year, it is phone calls like this that keep the family connected.
- Pramai Luersuebchart (through interpreter):The kids miss their mom. It’s the way it is. Life is difficult. We have to survive. She left two years ago. There is no money, no jobs here.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:And no way mom, with a factory job, could afford the day care and high living costs of Bangkok to bring her children along.So, Luersuebchart and his second wife, Tongtri Pulatakam (ph), also raising her daughter’s newborn, make do on a combined pension of about $36 a month and an increasingly unproductive rice field they farm on rented land.People in rural Thailand have for decades spent a few weeks each year away in the city earning extra income in between planting and the harvest. But in recent times, agriculture, the rice crop, in particular, has become unreliable as a source of income, and that’s forced longer and longer absences from home.
- Sara Vigil, Stockholm Environment Institute Asia:What climate change is doing is exacerbating impacts on other, more traditional economic and political drivers of migration.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:Sara Vigil is a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
- Sara Vigil:Migration should be a choice. There are communities that would like to remain in place, that it’s really a question of, we lack the resources to diversify our incomes, which is becoming more and more difficult, of course, in the context of climate change.So family separation is one of the very violent kind of social impacts.Women have been denied the basic human right of being a mother.Mechai Viravaidya is on a mission to reunite families. We met him at the temple in Nansuang (ph) near Thailand’s border with Cambodia, where a group of elderly residents were gathered.
- Mechai Viravaidya, Chair, Mechai Viravaidya Foundation (through interpreter):How many of you have children that have left for the city whom you would like to return home?
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:Mechai, now 82, is a world-renowned social innovator credited earlier with designing Thailand’s successful family planning campaigns.An economist by training, he started the Bamboo School nearby in 2009 to inspire rural youth in horticulture and entrepreneurship. Now he’s trying to address the social impacts of internal migration in a country where some three million children are raised by family other than their parents.
- Mechai Viravaidya:We are fighting out that more and more are willing to come home, especially if there’s an alternative.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:He started a pilot program called Homeward Bound that allows parents to return to their villages, provides them small loans and training to build and run a small business.
- Mechai Viravaidya:This would give very, very good profit, mushroom care. You pick it every day for three months. Just this much space will earn you 900,000 baht in a year.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:Or 25,000 U.S. dollars. He says farmers would be financially secure on a lot less.
- Mechai Viravaidya:Most farmers are rice farmers. And the income from growing rice once a year is five baht per square meter, which is horrendous. So we need to diversify.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:His school partners with nearby temples and hospitals where farmer’s markets are held. Bamboo School students bring their training to teach new techniques on how to grow profitable crops in small spaces.Mechai says the market is potentially huge. School lunches, for instance, could be supplied from small enterprises like the ones started in the Nansuang temple, planting vegetables and selling snacks prepared here. There are some 40,000 temples across this predominantly Buddhist country.
- Mechai Viravaidya:We have 25 billion baht budget for school lunch. If the Ministry of Education is willing, they could use part of that money to buy vegetables from the elderly. So that will help. And that’s part of the market system.You have got hospitals all over the place in Thailand. You have got schools. You have got temples. And we will take a look at any other organization that wants to work with us.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:And tapping into that economic cycle would, he thinks, be enough to help more people like 39-year-old Sukanya Ninpayak, who returned in January from her city job as a baker’s assistant.The Homeward Bound project allowed her and husband Prakai Tisantier (ph), himself laid off from a city job, to reunite with their daughters, 2 and 10, and her parents.
- Sukanya Ninpayak, Participant, Homeward Bound (through interpreter):My family was so excited when I returned, because visits before were infrequent.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:They have set up a small farm at home, growing mushrooms and sunflower microgreens that she sells at a nearby hospital farmer’s market.At a workshop explaining the Homeward Bound program, there was no shortage of eager applicants, driven by the financial reality of their work situation and the pain of separation.
- Sumitra Ritnarong, Retail Worker (through interpreter):Last time I left, my kid ran after the car, but to stay was not an option either.
- Pakong Chanakul, Factory Worker (through interpreter):If I stayed, I would have no livelihood to sustain them.
- Saknarin Tinthonglang, Factor Worker (through interpreter):I earn about $8.50 a day, but a plate of rice is $1.40, so there’s little extra money.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:Pramai Luersuebchart is urging his daughter to return to enroll in Mechai’s Homeward Bound program.
- Woman (through interpreter):I have a contract. I have to wait.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:His daughter, Samlit, says she feels out of place amid the bustle and bright lights of Bangkok, where she lives with her new husband, Suthi Sankamrad (ph). They are contract-bound for the next two years at their factory jobs.Leaving early would mean financial penalties.
- Samlit Luersuebchart, Factory Worker (through interpreter):I wish I could have raised my own children, but it hasn’t been possible. I don’t want to stay in Bangkok. I’m happiest when I can visit my children. My saddest memory is when I left my kids, but I didn’t have any money to buy food.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:For Mechai Viravaidya, the next step is scaling up.
- Mechai Viravaidya:We can bring in the banking system, where the government bank, Bank of Agriculture and Cooperatives — we need financial resources and business skills we can help with, and the other one is access to credit at a normal rate.
- Fred de Sam Lazaro:Affording parents enough money, he says, so they can stay close and parent.For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Fred de Sam Lazaro in Bangkok.
- Amna Nawaz:And Fred’s reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
Skipped Generations
When parents can’t afford to stay home
The number of households where children are raised by grandparents is rising in lower and middle-income countries. Parents have moved away for opportunities as agricultural jobs no longer provide a reliable income due to climate change. This report highlights an effort to make it affordable for parents in rural areas to stay home with their children.