Abstract
In this chapter the authors examine how parenting in migration context is portrayed in the academic discourse in Lithuania. The authors reveal the depictions of migration-induced child caring practices, based on the results of analysis of academic publications (2004–2017) carried out from January to March 2018 as part of the sub-study of the research project ‘Global Migration and Lithuanian Family: Family Practices, Circulation of Care, and the Return Strategies’. The chapter focus on the portrayal of parenting within the host country, after return from emigration and in transnational family settings. The analysis reveals how value judgements about family life rooted in the low mobility discourse are reproduced in academic publications on family and migration and lead the researchers to portray parenting in migration as ‘troubling’.
Highlights
For researchers studying family life in migration, shifting care arrangements and fluid relations between parents and children have always stood at the center of their study subject
Starting with the seminal contributions made by Parreñas (2005) studying migration in Philippines and Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) focusing on the Mexican experience, the researchers have identified various parenting patterns adopted by emigrant parents and demonstrated how caregiving circulates in the transnational space
Contrary to our expectations, which are largely based on the previous study of how transnational families are portrayed in the mass media and reports of rigid gender role definitions uncovered by similar studies of Western researchers, the papers we studied construct generalized narratives about the families living in emigration and returned to Lithuania as ‘parents-emigrants’ or ‘emigrated parents’, without providing separate portraits of emigrant mothers and fathers
Summary
For researchers studying family life in migration, shifting care arrangements and fluid relations between parents and children have always stood at the center of their study subject. Starting with the seminal contributions made by Parreñas (2005) studying migration in Philippines and Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) focusing on the Mexican experience, the researchers have identified various parenting patterns adopted by emigrant parents and demonstrated how caregiving circulates in the transnational space (see Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2011; Baldassar and Merla, 2014). Migration researchers have identified a wide range of family configurations, care practices and systems of meanings associated with parenting in migrant families. They demonstrate that parenthood is a dynamic social institution that is situationally affected by social factors mirroring predominant ideologies (Arendell, 2000), and that parenting as a cultural arrangement is far from immutable across space and time (Baldassar and Merla, 2014). The scholars studying the subject emphasize that parenting tends to reproduce, reshape, and represent different expectations and gender relations either in the host country, or in the country of origin as well as in cross-border family relationships (Phoenix and Bauer, 2012; Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2013)
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