The mirage of going abroad lures more and more Romanians who want to work there. Thousands of children are left without parents. The situation gets more and more serious the moment these parents are absent for a long time, he connection with their kids being a discontinuous one. Many of these children are emotionally affected, a quarter of them appreciate their parents' decision as not grounded and 40% haven't even been asked about what they thought when their parents decided to leave. The way children see their situation and the one of their family has been detected by the means of a survey drawn up by a joint team of professors and students at the Faculty of History and Philosophy - the Philosophy Department, within the University "Dunarea de Jos" in Galati. Almost half (45.67%) of the children whose parents are left to work abroad say they miss their parents very much. Mothers are left to work abroad for most of them, and the girls suffer more than the boys from their parents' absence, according to the above mentioned study. This survey has been applied over a number of 981 pupils from Galati, Braila, Iasi and Botosani counties in May-July 2007. "We don't want to cast a shadow over these children (...). We only want to identify the problems these kids have to face as well as the changes that occur in their and their parents' mentality. The main perspective of this study is what they think about themselves", say the authors of the study. According to the outcomes of the study, almost 39% of the children have their mother left to work abroad, 38% - the father, 23% have both parents left to work abroad. Taking into account the traditional pattern of the family, where mothers hold the main role in raising and educating the children, the fact that the percentage of them going abroad to work being similar to that of the fathers is considered of a nature to aggravate children's problems. Most of the kids who said they missed their parents very much have their mother away. This leads to the conclusion that the suffering higher when the mother is away than when the father is away; right below the mother's absence is placed the absence of both parents followed by that of the father. 22% say they miss "much" their parents and only 6% consider they miss "little" them. Although almost 77% of the kids have only one of the parents away, just a little more than half of them live with the other parent, the others living with other persons. There is also a differentiation urban/rural regarding the phenomenon (parents leaving abroad to work), as in the urban areas mother leave more as compared to the rural, where the fathers' leavings are more frequent. On the other hand, the number of children left without any parent aside is much higher in urban areas than in the rural ones (18.2% as to 4.9%). (Corina SCARLAT)