Search results

As migration of family members becomes an omnipresent phenomenon, the conventional norm of having a family and living under the same roof together is far from normal for many households. It produces transnational practices and multisite lifestyle configurations. This study aims to explore the implication of maternal absence as a result of transnational labour migration on the left-behind child in the context of transnational labour migration from Ethiopia.

It focusses on the perspective of those who stayed behind. The ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in two rural villages – Bulebullo and Bokekesa – of Worebabbo district in Northern Ethiopia. It involved in-depth interviews with children and their caregivers supported by interviews and group discussions with members of the community, local officials and traditional leaders.

Transnational mothering and other mothering emerge as new practices of mothering in the rural villages due to maternal absence have interrelated implications and meanings for the left-behind child. However, the rigidity of sending societies’ norms related to mothering and gendered labour dynamics exacerbated the negative implications of maternal absence on left-behind children. The absence of the fathers’ effort to redefine mothering or fathering by providing childcare is part of the equation in the relationship between maternal absence and left-behind children.

The findings of this study refute the notion that labels mother’s out-migration as “abandoning children”, “disrupting families” and “acts of selfishness”.

This paper describes the parent–child relationships of upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their adolescent children who were “parachuted” to the United States for private high schools. With parents remaining in China and children in the United States, thousands of miles away, such a transnational educational arrangement complicates the already volatile parent–child relationships during the adolescent years. Through ethnographic interviews of 41 students and 33 parents, I demonstrate different forms of child–parent relationships in a transnational education setting: those who found that the further physical and temporal distance has brought the parent–child relationship closer through frequent communications, children who experienced “accelerated growth” yet questioned the necessity, and delicate parent–child relationships due to increasing transnational cross-cultural or intergenerational differences. These types of parent–child relationships are not comprehensive of all the lived experiences of the “parachute generation,” yet they shed new light on transnational education and the unintended emotional dimensions of educational migration. In a transnational context for an economically well-off group, parental absence or separation of children and parents is no longer a clear-cut concept and has different layers of meanings, taking into account the frequency of communication, duration of spring and winter breaks and the existence of third-party agents such as for-profit intermediaries (or educational consultants) and host families. The diverse patterns of parent–child relations reveal the heterogeneity and complexities of “doing family” across geographic spaces and global educational hierarchies, as well as the roles of communication technologies, the tempo of mobilities and educational intermediaries.

This chapter is based on a study of 60 migrant women in Washington State, USA, and their communication with their families in and across borders through information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four themes were identified in the research concerning the uneasy ways family members used the ICTs to: (1) predicate migration decision-making through word-of-mouth and social media; (2) facilitate the movement of members across borders through stepwise migration; (3) affect the transition to a transnational family through establishing a sense of co-presence; and (4) mediate care through communication chains. The significance of the study demonstrates the need for relational thinking about transnational family communication and the mobilities of families. Transnational family members develop sophisticated ways of communicating through ICTs, albeit with difficulty, and which are embedded in interdependent systems of migration and mobilities.

The Albanian migration has always reflected a family character, be that before 1945 when Albania was not yet completely isolated, as well as after 1990 when borders were reopened. This feature characterized all types of movement, internal or international, permanent or seasonal migration, return migration or transnational movements and remigration. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the family as a very important factor in making decisions regarding migration and answering questions from why to how to migrate, from when to where, whom to ask for help or how to invest remittances.

Based on the case study of a rural area in Northern Albania, the Administrative Unit of Dajç, this paper explores in detail the roles of family and kinship on decisions regarding return migration, the re-adjustment process, remigration or transnational life.

By exploring the role of the family context in remigration and vice-versa, the paper reflects that the family biography – including the lifestyle, plans for the future or expectations – has changed due to previous migration experiences or challenges and difficulties when returning to the home country.

It demonstrates how individual decisions to migrate or to “return home” are negotiated and supported within families making transnational life a family project. The paper adopts a new approach in the Albanian Migration Studies, which may be implied on broader areas for further research in the future.

Scholars have found that transnational migrant women fulfill their role of mothers despite geographical distances. Researchers, however, focus on women in their country of destination, and thus have neglected to look at the experiences of women who get “stuck” in transit countries during their migration journeys. This chapter fills that gap in the literature by examining the experiences of Sub-Saharan African women in Morocco en route to Europe. Interviews with 20 Sub-Saharan African women show that unlike transnational mothers in their country of destination, which are mostly more affluent nations, these women neither have the financial means to provide for their children nor can maintain their relationships with them via telecommunication. Although the women acknowledge that they cannot fulfill their role of mothers in Morocco, they maintain a sense of themselves as mothers by emphasizing that they will financially provide for their children once they reach Europe.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight gaps in the literature regarding transnational ties, the experience of raising and caring for children in a new (high-income) country and well-being, and to propose a program of research to address these gaps.

A general review of the literature on international migration, transnationalism and parenthood was conducted. A program of research and its objectives are then described.

To address research gaps, the proposed program of research aims to: develop approaches and tools to examine and measure the transnational experiences of migrant families; better understand migrants’ transnational obligations, resources and movements and their impact on parenthood and the health and well-being of families; assess whether existing health and social care and services for migrant families with children consider the transnational contexts and experiences of families; and determine how health and social care and services for migrant families with children may be adapted or developed to address transnational challenges and enhance transnational resources for families.

The proposed program of research offers a new approach, transnationalism, for producing knowledge toward better understanding the health and optimizing the care of migrant families in the context of raising and caring for children in a new country. It also contributes to the agenda setting regarding the approach and priority areas for research in migrant health.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started and intensified over two years ago, constant lockdowns and social distancing measures have left many people feeling disconnected and disoriented. To recapture and sustain a semblance of normalcy and connected co-existence, online platforms, and various communication media have become indispensable. However, this mode of social connectedness while being physically separated is nothing new to Filipino transnational families who have persevered and kept their familial bonds alive and well across time and space.

Based on findings from an ongoing ethnographic study that started in 2016, in this chapter, the author engages with critical issues regarding how communication technologies shape the exchange of familial care and intimacy within contexts of geographical dispersion. Through a discussion of the ways in which new forms of communication reconstruct the temporal and spatial aspects of Filipino transnational family life, the author explains how families preserve and nurture their collective commitments to the maintenance of kinship by using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to (re)enact and (re)create mundane existences but also to recognize, celebrate, and display significant milestones along the family life course. One of the key questions raised is how effective technology-mediated exchanges are in substituting for physical co-presence, which is widely accepted as the foundation of strong and healthy family relationships. By interrogating these issues, the author builds on a valuable body of research which theorizes how ICTs facilitate new forms of intimacy and virtual togetherness; but also contentious relations and emotional burdens that test the Filipino family’s resilience in turbulent times.

This chapter is a potent elaboration of how Filipino transnational family members adopt creative strategies to integrate their fragmented existences and (re)embed themselves into each other’s temporalities and subjectivities.

An increasing number of international immigrant workers enter the EU labour market to fill the gap in many key economic sectors. Labour migration often implies a process of family adaptation and, in some cases, a breakdown in the community structure and networks. This study aims to provide insights into the dynamics of transnational families, focusing on changes in the redefinition of roles within family members and children care arrangements.

The study was based on the analysis of 12 biographical interviews conducted using semi-structured interviews between November 2018 and December 2019 among Romanian women who worked as caregivers in families in an Italian metropolitan city and the surrounding urban area.

Despite the economic dimension being essential, psychological well-being increasingly burdens workers’ migratory experience and that of their family members. Findings suggest including employers and children among the actively involved actors of the family decision-making process; working and contractual conditions as factors that significantly impact the opportunities and capability of workers to provide and receive care, mainly if the latter are employed in the informal market.

The study makes it possible to highlight that the dynamics in decision-making processes in transnational families change in the different phases of the migration project and involve numerous actors. These processes are not always rational and are strongly influenced by the labour market structure in which migrants are employed.

Although the theory of cumulative causation posits a “saturation point” at which all members of a rural community who are potential transnational migrants will have migrated, in the case of dynamic out-migration centers, this saturation point may never be reached. This is because growth centers – the growth often having been propelled by wages and remittances of prior migrants – attract in-migrants from poorer, less dynamic, surrounding ranchos that eventually become incorporated in transnational migration networks of the more dynamic rancho. It is also due to intermarriage as well as friendship and ritual kinship ties between members of the core rancho and surrounding ranchos.