To reach Sperieteni, a village some 50 kilometers from Bucharest, leave the highway and drive half an hour along a dusty, unpaved road. Despite its remoteness, the village is infamous in Dambovita County.

"If you're looking for a place where only children and old people live, you have to go to Sperieteni," says a woman in a village on the main road.

Indeed, the children here - as in many other settlements in the county - grow up virtually alone, many waiting for their house-cleaning mothers to call from Italy or Spain on Christmas, hoping to see them for perhaps two weeks during the summer holiday. Some wait to finish carpentry or another trade school, then join their fathers on construction sites across Europe. Others end up in foster homes or even orphanages, though they have parents. And on occasion, a 10-year-old drops out of school, runs away from home, or even hangs himself in the closet with father's tie.

The Romanian government estimates that 40,000 children - though the actual figure may be much higher - have been left behind by migrants who go west in search of a job and money they cannot find at home. These are the children raised by mail, telephone, even webcams.

But the parents' financial calculations wreak long-term costs on their children: teachers describe assorted behavioral issues in the classroom, while of greater concern, hospitals in eastern Romania recently began reporting a rash of suicides and suicide attempts among troubled adolescents unable to cope with their feelings. While westward migration has been widespread over the past 17 years, government officials and activists say they were unaware of any such crisis until Romanian media first began highlighting the problem last year.

Some child protection activists blame parents for limited understanding of their children's emotional needs and the stigma attached to any form of psychological therapy as a sign the person is "crazy." And the problem of children left behind may soon grow - if, as some observers predict, Romania's accession to the European Union this past January encourages countless more Romanians to emigrate.

For a Frenchman like Poupard who came to Romania to monitor children's rights, the tens of thousands left in the care of relatives - and deprived of that special parental bond - is quite unique. "It's an alarming phenomenon," he says. "But we cannot judge anybody. We need to understand first. In Romanian society, there is the idea that a child's upbringing needs only material things: a roof, food, and going to school. But the parents have to understand that a child needs his or her mother."

In Sperieteni itself, the place hums on a springlike Saturday afternoon. The road is full of boys playing football and girls skipping rope. Old women sit on small chairs in front of their gates, sighing from time to time, keeping an eye on their grandchildren. They don't talk to strangers easily. The words come heavily.

"Eh, most of the young ones have left; more than half the village," whispers an old woman in her seventies, sitting alone under a blossoming cherry tree. "A few have taken the children with them. But the rest live with their grannies. It's so difficult to live here now. I am old and at my age, it's not easy to take care of the house and these girls."

Indeed, her daughter, Liliana, left her two daughters, 12 and 9, with her two years ago when she went to Spain to work as a housekeeper. "She had to," her mother laments, her voice rising as she paints a picture of parental sacrifice. "Her husband left her. We had no sign of him for years. She had nothing to do here, in this village. She had to go to get money and raise these girls properly."

Soon the old woman returns to her own troubles. The girls " are so difficult to raise," she says. "Liliana sends money every month, but it's still difficult. I am ill … I don't know what to do with them. I would give them to an orphanage, but they won't accept them."

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