Family Care in the Transnational Families: Love, Blame and Obligation

Currently, in the era of globalization, migration movements include an increasing number of families, more and more frequently a new type of family, a transnational family. Accordingly, the functions of the family and family practice of everyday life, the relationships between members of the group change together with the roles they play in the context of caregiving. Caregiving function is most frequently exercised by women: mothers and daughters. In case of migration, they need to develop strategies to reconcile the role of a caregiver with the role of a working migrant. This article discusses the dilemmas that migrant women and their families need to address in the scale of micro-social relationships, strategies of coping with care deficit in case of children left behind and the old parents. The paper will present the analysis of semi-qualitative studies of Polish families of female migrants: children, old parents/ grandparents and their caregivers (N=100). The main problems presented will be: areas of care deficit, relations with female migrants working abroad, relations with caregivers and emotional and social problems they meet in the situation of care deficit (f.e feeling blame, being abandoned).