Grandparenting Across Borders: A Form of Transnational Ageing
Grandparenting across borders represents a form of transnational ageing that increasingly concerns seniors regardless of whether or not they have a migration background or previous international mobility experiences. Based on insights from the nccr-on the move’s “Transnational Ageing” study, this blog post highlights the extent of transnational grandparenting practices among older adults living in Switzerland. Moreover, it gives two examples of these grandparents’ childcare-related mobility patterns.
In the context of increased international mobility, many families are nowadays geographically widely spread. Older family members are challenged by this new reality, having to adapt and take on their grandparental roles at a distance. Some of them act as transnational grandparents, by maintaining close ties with their grandchildren across borders. Transnational grandparenting involves various mobility practices, as well as new types of (virtual) co-presence (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016) that allow grandparents to provide childcare despite the wide geographical dispersion of their offspring. These grandparenting practices represent thus a specific form of transnational ageing that we define as the process unfolding from a combination of various cross-border mobilities, practices and flows in which older adults take part to meet their needs, fulfill social and family roles, and cope with economic constraints in old age.
The phenomenon of transnational grandparenting raised increasing attention in the “ageing and migration” field of research (Nedelcu and Wyss 2020). It has been much investigated in the case of migrants’ parents that enter back-and-forth transnational mobilities to take care of their grandchildren settled in destination countries in the Global North (i.e. the “Zero Generation”). However, little is yet known about the extent of this phenomenon in the case of older adults living in Western countries and who have their offspring abroad.
Transnational Grandparents Residing in Switzerland
Based on the “Transnational Ageing” study of the nccr-on the move, we argue that transnational grandparenting practices concern not only people with migration backgrounds but also mobile and non-mobile Swiss seniors.
In the framework of this study, a new Transnational Ageing Survey I (TAS I) was conducted with people aged over 55 residing in Switzerland. Results of TAS I show that 38% of the 3772 respondents to this survey have grandchildren younger than 15. Among them, 10% have grandchildren living in another country than Switzerland. Moreover, two-thirds of these transnational grandparents report participation in childcare duties of grandchildren abroad on a regular or occasional basis. Among these transnational caregivers, 78% have a migration background, while 22% of them are Swiss seniors without a migration history.
Data from qualitative interviews conducted with a dozen seniors living in Switzerland that have grandchildren abroad allows us to describe more in-depth their mobilities and care practices as transnational grandparents. As illustrated further by two contrasting examples, we highlight that transnational grandparenting is experienced in similar ways by grandparents with different previous mobility/migration experiences.
The first case is a Swiss couple of young retirees who have always lived in Switzerland, and who are grandparents to five grandchildren: two living in Switzerland and three abroad. The couple’s son has been living together with his family in a Middle Eastern country as an expat for over ten years. Benefiting from regular school holidays as teachers, these grandparents visit their offspring several times a year. Moreover, during the summer holidays, they usually spend two months abroad taking care of their grandchildren, while the parents are at work. Given that these grandparents are also involved in regular childcare of their other grandchildren based in Switzerland, they clearly display their willingness to “do family” both here and there.
The second case studied is a French-Swiss couple who, after having lived for several decades abroad, returned to Switzerland in 2015. All their offspring (i.e., two adult children and four grandchildren) now live abroad on different continents. Their son’s family (including three grandchildren) is living in South Africa, and the daughter’s one is based in a South-Eastern Asian country. Since these retirees returned to Switzerland, they are alternately visiting their grandchildren, once every two years, for several weeks each time. Although the visits allow the couple to spend time together with the family and keep up family ties, they are limited by the constraints of long-distance travel.
In both cases, in addition to such more or less frequent transnational mobilities of these grandparents, grandchildren also visit them in Switzerland during the holidays. Moreover, intergenerational relationships are continuously maintained and reinforced through digital communication tools, enabling different forms of co-presence at a distance. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent restrictions on international mobility, it was in fact mainly these forms of virtual co-presence that allowed families to stay in touch. Nevertheless, the grandparents interviewed expressed their frustration about not being physically able to meet their grandchildren for a long time. This frustration seemed even bigger when grandchildren were still small, as one grandmother explained in May 2021:
“We miss holding our grandchildren. […] And the youngest, who is 2 years old, is progressing tremendously and we don’t have the opportunity to see him and share these moments, to live them. And we don’t know when it will be possible to visit them again. It makes us sad.”
Ageing Across Borders as Transnational Grandparents
Different ways of taking a grandparental role across borders exist, depending on the frequency of visits and childcare practices. The reported examples also suggest that (long/short) geographical distances and temporal contexts (family life-course and unforeseeable events such as COVID-19 pandemics) play a significant role in how transnational grandparenting is experienced. At the same time, as we have shown, this phenomenon concerns seniors in Switzerland irrespective of their migration background or previous international mobility experiences. Thus, transnational grandparenting does not reflect a form of “migrant exceptionalism” (Hui 2016) and, within contemporary families, more seniors are ageing across borders as transnational grandparents.
Mihaela Nedelcu is a titular professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Neuchâtel. She studies transnational families, transnational ageing processes, ageing migrants and the impact of ICTs on migration and transnationalism. She is a leader of the IP33 (Transnational Ageing) Project in phase II of the nccr – on the move.
Malika Wyss is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Neuchâtel. She has worked on several SNSF-funded research projects, including topics of transnational families and grandparenting, migration and ICTs.
This post is based on findings from the research project: “Transnational Ageing: Post-Retirement Mobilities, Transnational Lifestyles and Care Configurations” funded by the Swiss National Foundation within the nccr – on the move.
References:
– Hui, A. (2016). The Boundaries of Interdisciplinary Fields: Temporalities Shaping the Past and Future of Dialogue between Migration and Mobilities Research. Mobilities 11(1), 66–82.
– Nedelcu, M. and Wyss, M. (2016). ‘Doing family’ through ICT-mediated ordinary co-presence routines: Transnational communication practices of Romanian migrants in Switzerland. Global Networks 16(2), 202–218.
– Nedelcu, M. and Wyss, M. (2020). Transnational Grandparenting: An Introduction. Global Networks 20(2), 292–307.
