Official statistics show that migrant parents have left behind some 5,300 children in Chisinau alone, which is more than two times the level of the previous academic year, Svetlana Chifa, head of the City Department for Children’s Rights, told a roundtable meeting on Friday. Raising and giving education to these children in the absence of their parents’ love and attention are causing them psychological distress, Svetlana Chifa emphasised. The negative effects of parental migration on children are also the increase in the juvenile delinquency and in the number of the so-called social orphans. The most dangerous consequence is that the generation of the left-behind children could give rise to a generation of parents with deviant moral visions, Svetlana Chifa said. The municipal official took the occasion of the roundtable to urge the social assistants to visit every child left behind, ask what his needs are, and formulate recommendations, so that by February 2008 the Department could submit to the Chisinau City Council a draft to raise public awareness of the impact of work migration on children.