Interrogating parenting and intergenerational relationships within national and transnational contexts

As human mobility increases and becomes more diverse, the strategies and practices families adopt to ensure the prosperity of their members have evolved. Families are not only keen on maintaining intergenerational solidarities that are characterized by emotional and behavioural interaction and cohesion; they also seek individual and collective prosperity for family members. Familial reciprocity means that family members with different experiences and varying degrees of resources can provide support to one another. Older family members, for instance, have a wealth of lived experiences that can be offered as guidance to younger generations. They may also have a larger endowment of financial resources to keep the family afloat in difficult times. At the same time, adult children or young adult grandchildren can often help their parents or grandparents when their health and mobility become limited. No doubt, the youngest generation also provides familial support by completing tasks and processes that involve the use of technology and those that might be technically complicated for older generations. Meanwhile, young children provide affection and happiness. In addition, they are often a source of joy in the family.

Sociological interrogations into these critical interdependencies are extremely significant for our understanding of contemporary family life. Over the last few decades, sociologists and other researchers have documented the complex and varied forms in which care circulates within familial networks (see Baldassar et al., 2007; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Nedelcu and Wyss, 2016). For example, studies show how parents take great consideration when deciding where to educate their children – often switching them from one school to another (e.g. Atterberry, 2021). Meanwhile, other studies illustrate how grandparents play an important role in caring for grandchildren who were born abroad and then sent back to the ‘home’ country (e.g. McCallum, 2019, 2021). Within a multigenerational framework, families within and across borders have adopted strategies aimed at outcomes that are as differentiated and unique as they are imperative. Therefore, certain questions must be raised: How do parents ensure that their children have the skills necessary to navigate the global economy? What types of social and cultural knowledge do parents pass along to their children? How do parents navigate their responsibilities while being physically separated from their children? These are some of the questions addressed by the six articles featured in this special sub-section (SSS), which focuses on parenting and intergenerational relationships.

Responding to these questions, the articles in this SSS offer insight into how micro, meso, and macro factors affect the practical and symbolic aspects of family life as experienced within and across borders. In concert with Current Sociology’s prominent role in contemporary debates surrounding parenting and intergenerational relationships, this SSS builds upon existing literature related to social inequality and social mobility (Schuerkens, 2005; Weiss, 2005); the intersections of globalization, education, and social inequality (Ball et al., 2010; Lan, 2018); racial and ethnic socialization (Dow, 2019; Hagerman, 2018); and the depth and diversity of migrant families’ multi-local experiences (Rye, 2019; Solari, 2019). The substantive and theoretical content of this SSS makes it most relevant to those whose work focuses on family life, migration, aging, ethnicity, schooling, and social inequality.

This SSS emerged from the insightful academic exchanges and discussions at the 2019 ISA International Laboratory for PhD Students in Sociology, ‘Mobilities and Social Inequalities in a Globalized World’. Therefore, we owe a sincere gratitude to the Lab’s organizers – Laura Oso Casas, Filomin C. Gutierrez, and Mounir Saidani – and the International Sociological Association for making this opportunity possible. The authors featured in this SSS are a culturally diverse group of scholars from North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean whose work is substantively diverse and theoretically rich. Atterberry investigates how middle-, upper-middle-, and upper-class Indian and first-generation Indian American return migrants in urban India navigate local schooling options in their effort to prepare their children for adulthoods characterized by transnational mobility. Tu examines the motivations behind upper-middle-class urban Chinese families’ decisions to send their only children to the United States to complete their secondary education. McCallum explores how transnational Filipino families circulate love and affection through cross-border gift-giving practices. Kim focuses on the implications of grandparent caregiving on the relationships between Chinese American older adults and their adult children, as well as the psychological well-being of older adults. Etienne addresses cultural socialization practices among Haitian American parents in the United States. Finally, Lu et al. considers how cognitive and academic advantages are transmitted from parents to children in China via cultural capital. Collectively, these articles reflect geographical breadth and a diversity of human experience. They illustrate how parents respond to new challenges in terms of equipping their children with the resources and skills necessary to achieve social mobility within the 21st-century knowledge economy (Atterberry, Lu et al., and Tu), the subtle intricacies of maintaining intergenerational relationships within transnational and immigrant families (Kim and McCallum), and the nuanced messages parents pass onto their children about their ethnic and racial heritage (Etienne). Overall, these articles provide a glimpse into family life in the 21st century.

While these articles provide a glimpse into contemporary family life, they do so prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is quite possible that the pandemic affected some of the social and cultural practices that these articles address. For example, parents may be less keen to send their children abroad for secondary and higher education. As a result, they may seek out other educational avenues through which to secure their children’s futures. In addition, the social significance of transnational gift-giving may have intensified such that there is a broader range of emotions and meaning attached to this sacred intra-family exchange. As such, we invite scholars to consider the issues we address within this SSS and, in doing so, use them as foundations through which to investigate the social and cultural circumstances of our post-pandemic world.