This paper explores how past migration decisions resonate in family presents and futures in ways that are unpredictable, that shape intergenerational care exchanges, and that introduce previously unanticipated states of migrancy, liminality and uncertainty into the lives of older adults. Chinese grandparents who provide transnational care for grandchildren in Australia do so in response to the practical needs of their adult children whom they previously supported to study overseas. Their actions align with culturally informed intergenerational expectations regarding the obligations of older adults to support their descendants’ economic and social wellbeing. Yet in choosing to travel to provide intergenerational care in a foreign land, these migrant grandparents risk harmful impacts to multiple aspects of wellbeing, including financial insecurity, social disconnection, or poor physical and mental health. Such risks increase with age as they contemplate futures where they must either grow old away from the familiarity and established social networks of the homeland, or away from the filial support of their only children and grandchildren.
Case studies drawn from collaborative research with Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding illustrate the temporally inflected tensions, anxieties and ambiguities that are generated through family decisions to support or encourage migration at different points in the life course. Ageing parents who worked hard to send their only children overseas as international students during the early 2000s now commonly express regret, or at best ambivalence, at the unanticipated consequences of these past family decisions to fulfil cultural imaginaries of study abroad. Reflections on and rationalisation of their choices and actions then and now are framed with reference to shifting expectations of what constitutes good parenting, expectations that are as subject to changing cultural imaginaries within the homeland as they are to differences that may exist or be perceived between ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies.
This paper explores how past migration decisions resonate in family presents and futures in ways that are unpredictable, that shape intergenerational care exchanges, and that introduce previously unanticipated states of migrancy, liminality and uncertainty into the lives of older adults. Chinese grandparents who provide transnational care for grandchildren in Australia do so in response to the practical needs of their adult children whom they previously supported to study overseas. Their actions align with culturally informed intergenerational expectations regarding the obligations of older adults to support their descendants’ economic and social wellbeing. Yet in choosing to travel to provide intergenerational care in a foreign land, these migrant grandparents risk harmful impacts to multiple aspects of wellbeing, including financial insecurity, social disconnection, or poor physical and mental health. Such risks increase with age as they contemplate futures where they must either grow old away from the familiarity and established social networks of the homeland, or away from the filial support of their only children and grandchildren.
Case studies drawn from collaborative research with Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding illustrate the temporally inflected tensions, anxieties and ambiguities that are generated through family decisions to support or encourage migration at different points in the life course. Ageing parents who worked hard to send their only children overseas as international students during the early 2000s now commonly express regret, or at best ambivalence, at the unanticipated consequences of these past family decisions to fulfil cultural imaginaries of study abroad. Reflections on and rationalisation of their choices and actions then and now are framed with reference to shifting expectations of what constitutes good parenting, expectations that are as subject to changing cultural imaginaries within the homeland as they are to differences that may exist or be perceived between ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies.
This paper explores how past migration decisions resonate in family presents and futures in ways that are unpredictable, that shape intergenerational care exchanges, and that introduce previously unanticipated states of migrancy, liminality and uncertainty into the lives of older adults. Chinese grandparents who provide transnational care for grandchildren in Australia do so in response to the practical needs of their adult children whom they previously supported to study overseas. Their actions align with culturally informed intergenerational expectations regarding the obligations of older adults to support their descendants’ economic and social wellbeing. Yet in choosing to travel to provide intergenerational care in a foreign land, these migrant grandparents risk harmful impacts to multiple aspects of wellbeing, including financial insecurity, social disconnection, or poor physical and mental health. Such risks increase with age as they contemplate futures where they must either grow old away from the familiarity and established social networks of the homeland, or away from the filial support of their only children and grandchildren.
Case studies drawn from collaborative research with Loretta Baldassar and Raelene Wilding illustrate the temporally inflected tensions, anxieties and ambiguities that are generated through family decisions to support or encourage migration at different points in the life course. Ageing parents who worked hard to send their only children overseas as international students during the early 2000s now commonly express regret, or at best ambivalence, at the unanticipated consequences of these past family decisions to fulfil cultural imaginaries of study abroad. Reflections on and rationalisation of their choices and actions then and now are framed with reference to shifting expectations of what constitutes good parenting, expectations that are as subject to changing cultural imaginaries within the homeland as they are to differences that may exist or be perceived between ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies.
Keywords
intergenerational care
migration
temporalities
transnational grandparenting
