Stayer youth shaping their transnational family lives

Abstract

A growing number of young people in origin countries reside there without one or both parents due to their parents’ international migration. However, most of the current literature overlooks the perceptions and agency of these youth due to increasing attention on what migrant parents and local caregivers do for stayer youth's experiences and aspirations. Contemporary youth studies call on emerging scholarships like this study to engage with youth for an extensive understanding of their experiences and aspirations. This is a case study of Ghanaian stayer youth's lives. I “followed” thirty-eight stayer youth for 15 months to understand their experiences and aspirations through a youth-centric ethnography. This study shows that stayer youth are agentic in shaping their experiences and aspirations over time within their transnational family context. These young people show their agency through the way they employ ICTs to maintain and shape their relationships with their parents abroad; how they mobilize broader local and transnational social support networks to ensure their educational trajectories; and the way they adapt their aspirations to match the resources that are available to them. This study shows the importance of going beyond the dyad or triad (migrant parent-stayer youth or migration parent-caregiver-stayer youth) that has characterised most transnational family studies, to account for all relationships or interactions that shape these youth's experiences and aspirations.