Introduction: the absent child and transnational families

This article introduces the concept of the absent child, and shows its importance for understanding experiences of contemporary transnational families. The article moves beyond a dominant scholarly focus on split families of working migrant parents and stay‐behind children in home communities. Instead, it draws out the power of absence in mobile families, focusing on the signs, meanings, imaginations and practices around children who may be hidden, deceased, imagined, abandoned or in other ways not present. It provides an introduction to four accompanying articles based on original research with families from Indonesia and the Philippines. These articles focus on the absent child as prosthesis for families, on the subtleties of affect around absence, and on the impact of normative regulatory practices on child absence.