Transnational Displays of Parenting and Caring For Elderly Parents

Abstract

This chapter is set up to incorporate Finch’s idea of ‘display’ to examine how migrant parents, adult migrant children, and close significant persons perform a set of actions to convey to each other and the society at large that these are family-doing activities. The authors sought to demonstrate that the concept of ‘display’ could be applied to analyze transnational practices of parenting and caring for elderly parents in a quantitative way. The chapter draws on the data from a quotabased survey (N = 304) of three types of transnational families: mother-away and father-away with under-aged children living in Lithuania and adult child-away with elderly parents needing care living in Lithuania. The study was carried out in August 2018 as part of the research project ‘Global Migration and Lithuanian Family: Family Practices, Circulation of Care, and the Return Strategies’.

Keywords

• Transnational families
• cross-border displays