Abstract
The negotiation of migration decisions within the families of post-accession mobile workers from Poland and Romania in Sweden is explored through the concept of family obligations. This study departs from Finch’s (1987) and Mason’s (1996) seminal works, which identified a wide range of supportive (and non-supportive) exchanges and negotiated commitments within families and their kin. Drawing on Mason’s (1996) definition of care as both sentient activity and active sensibility, we seek to understand how migrant parents negotiate their migration decisions as an act of care and responsibility, but also as morally imbued obligations in relation to their children. As an analytical tool, the lifeline method (Davies, 1996) is used to capture key moments and events shaping the migration decisions of European workers’ families, which include their motivations to pursue migration, the gendered patterns of care shaping their migration decisions, and moral reasoning over what is the right thing to do in relation to caring for their children. The analysis shows that mobile families’ decisions to migrate are ‘livelihood strategies’ involving complex and dynamic negotiations over the options and resources of entire families and their kin across generations and transnational locations. While reflecting on their decisions over time, both migrant parents express their genuine involvement in caring responsibilities. However, the actual practice shows that caring is still a gendered activity. Finally, the decision to migrate shows that migration itself can be seen as an act of relational and emotional caring involving moral reasoning, feelings and thoughts through which migrant parents negotiate their “good parenthood”.
Highlights
The central question of this article is how do migrant parents negotiate their migration decisions as an act of care and responsibility, and as morally imbued obligations in relation to their children, with a particular focus on the negotiations of migration decisions within the families of postaccession mobile workers from Poland and Romania in Sweden.1 Our approach to what constitutes family obligations stems from Finch’s (1987, 1989) and Mason’s (1996) seminal works identifying a wide range of supportive exchanges within families and their kin as “the manifestations of responsibilities” (Yeandle, 1996, p 508) developing over time with moral, emotional, and material components
We focus on mobile workers and their families from two European Union (EU) countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), i.e., Poland and Romania, which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, respectively
We have presented six different cases that reflect different strategies in migration decisions and trajectories, imbued with shifting moralities, responsibilities and feelings that illustrate a complex nature of caring as a relational activity composed of material, moral and cognitive components (Mason, 1996)
Summary
The central question of this article is how do migrant parents negotiate their migration decisions as an act of care and responsibility, and as morally imbued obligations in relation to their children, with a particular focus on the negotiations of migration decisions within the families of postaccession mobile workers from Poland and Romania in Sweden. Our approach to what constitutes family obligations stems from Finch’s (1987, 1989) and Mason’s (1996) seminal works identifying a wide range of supportive (and non-supportive) exchanges within families and their kin as “the manifestations of responsibilities” (Yeandle, 1996, p 508) developing over time with moral, emotional, and material components. Our approach to what constitutes family obligations stems from Finch’s (1987, 1989) and Mason’s (1996) seminal works identifying a wide range of supportive (and non-supportive) exchanges within families and their kin as “the manifestations of responsibilities” (Yeandle, 1996, p 508) developing over time with moral, emotional, and material components. Seen from this angle, we seek to shed light on the manifestations of the multiple familiar responsibilities related to care between parents and their younger children in the context of parental labor migration. Following the wider European tendencies, most of the recent arrivals to Sweden and other Nordic countries are from Poland and lately from Romania, which are the two dominant countries of origin among post-accession migrants (Olofsson, 2012; Friberg and Eldring, 2013; Delmi, 2016)
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