Transnational care dynamics: between emotions and rationality
(2010) 5th ESFR Congress Family transitions and families in transition — Location: Catholic University of Milan (29.September.2010)
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- This paper examines the consequences of migration on adult children’s capacity to care for their ageing parents. Our aim is to better understand the relationship between rationality and emotions in decisions related to the provision of care to elderly parents in transnational families. Recent research on transnational care practices (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007) demonstrates that most transnational families exchange all the forms of care and support that Finch (1989) identified as being exchanged in proximate families, including financial, practical, personal, accommodation and emotional or moral support. Access to resources significantly impacts on the capacity to care from a distance. But the decision to exchange care is also informed by the negotiated commitments that develop out of family histories and personal relationships within families (Finch and Mason 1993). The particular practices of transnational care-giving are also influenced by a sense of obligation to provide care, a notion that is closely bound up in cultural constructions of duty and social roles and responsibilities. Baldassar et al argue that the exchange of care between transmigrants and their kin back home is influenced by a dialectic of capacity, negotiated commitments and obligation to participate. The mobility of care is located in the realm of the ‘economies of kinship’, including, but not limited to, the exchange of economic resources within families.
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Baldassar, L., & Merla, L. (2010). Transnational care dynamics: between emotions and rationality. 5th ESFR Congress Family transitions and families in transition, Catholic University of Milan. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/162755