THERE CAN be no denying that the diaspora might help to ease the poverty. But there is concern, too, of how much of a difference all those remittances will make in the long term. The Asian Development Bank has already noted how the overseas workers' money are creating cycles of dependency for those left behind, with entire clans depending on the labor of a few relatives working abroad. With the dollars coming in, there is less incentive for those left behind to find work.

There are concerns as well of how the remittances can "corrupt" people left behind, particularly adolescent children. With larger allowances than classmates who have no relatives working overseas, children of OFWs have acquired notoriety for profligate spending habits.

And while the money flows in creating a better life for the young, there is concern about one or both parents missing. Proponents of labor export will argue that we have an extended family system so there will always be people to care for the children of migrant workers. Certainly, we will see families becoming more extended in the next few years, partly because it has become too expensive, especially in urban areas, to maintain separate households. These extended households mean more people who can help as surrogate parents when someone has to leave and work in the big city, or overseas.

We're already seeing this development reflected in kinship terms with many grandparents, uncles and aunts, even household help now called "Mama" and "Papa" because they have assumed those roles.

But beneath those changes in kinship terms are very real questions about how the members of the next generation of Filipinos are forming their identities today and how they look at the future. I've visited many urban poor households where the grandparents, who are acting as surrogate parents, will urge their grandchildren to study hard by pointing to a photograph of absent parents: "Mag-aral ka, para maka-abroad kayo, parang si tatay at nanay (Study, so you can go and work abroad, like your father and mother). "

We forget that we have living examples of how migratory work can disrupt family life and create serious social problems. For decades now, young rural Filipinas have been migrating in large numbers to the cities to work as domestic helpers. There, they are easily seduced by urban-bred males, as well as by rural men who have become city-smart. The family driver, the houseboy, the security guard, the construction worker — they all represent a better life so an often brief courtship leads to a pregnancy, and the male disappears. The baby is shipped back to the provinces, to be cared for by the grandparents.

The domestic helper is now wiser, but this does not necessarily mean she will take precautions about pregnancies. More babies will follow, by different men, and the lesson she picks up is that she won't need those men anyway. She leads her own life, her kids raised by the grandparents. And when the children grow up, she goes home and brings them back to the city. The relationship of the children with the returning mother will be strained. There are new problems of errant sons — and daughters — again with early pregnancies. Guess who cares for this next generation?

We will see more of these generational cycles being repeated. Lessons are not learned; instead, we come to accept these new family arrangements as inevitable. The last time we had a national census, about 11 percent of households were headed by single mothers. I am certain the actual figure was higher, given that some of the women were in temporary arrangements with a male partner. By 2010, if we do have a national census that looks at single-parent households, we can expect even higher figures.

THE RECONFIGURATION of the Filipino family will be complicated, involving a major revamp of roles and statuses. Let's take seafarers as an example: with about 250,000 of them deployed overseas, one can expect almost as many Filipino households managed by women. Dr. Henrietta Española is a psychiatrist working in Iloilo City, known for its large numbers of seafarers. She says she has clients who are wives of the seafarers and they tend to seek psychiatric help when their husbands are about to come home. Used to running a household alone, they fear the new demands made by the returning husband, from "running the household like it was his ship" to the rush to "gawa baby (make another child)."

Here at home, internal migration has created its own new family dynamics. Soledad Dalisay, an anthropology professor at the University of the Philippines, did her doctoral dissertation in a small town in Batangas, where many women had taken up jobs as factory workers. The result? The emergence of househusbands, not always with satisfactory results given that family structures have not adjusted to training men to assume domestic responsibilities.

The feminization of labor in general poses new challenges to our family-rearing cultures. We still tend to pamper our males, and unfortunately, as more women work, this may not be accompanied by a growth in male responsibility. The strains on women will increase, affecting family life — sometimes with new twists to the problems. For example, women working outside the home, and especially overseas, have been known to develop strong guilt feelings about having left children behind. To compensate, they may become lax with allowances, especially for sons. The consequences are predictable: a new generation of spoiled men, who may in fact end up looking for wives who can support them — by working overseas.

Already, some of the most heartbreaking stories from overseas Filipina workers revolve around the way their husbands squander the money they send home. A few years ago, one Filipina maid in Hong Kong told me, with anger in her voice: "I slave away here as a maid, and he uses the money I send home to f--k our maid."

The possibilities of extramarital relationships increase, both for those left behind, and those who leave. Changing gender roles also mean that the cat and mouse will both play: if the male is unfaithful, then women feel they, too, are entitled to extramarital liaisons.

One of the greatest fears that Filipino seafarers have is that the wife they left behind may be having extramarital relationships. A government clerk who happens to be a seafarer's wife told me, "My husband's salary is more than enough for our needs, but he insists I work because he's afraid if I don't, then I'll spend all my time in the malls, and will get seduced by some young man." The husband's fears are not unfounded; gigolos are known to roam the malls, adept at identifying lonely seafarers' wives.