Author Identifier (ORCID)
Catriona Stevens: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2207-687X
Yu Huang: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7480-0030
Loretta Baldassar: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6246-4773
Abstract
This article juxtaposes cases of grandparents who provide care for their grandchildren in two broad types of migrant families: (1) families where some members have migrated from the Chinese countryside to larger cities and (2) families where some members have migrated from China to Australia. By examining the proximate, mobile and digital forms of their grandparenting care labour, this article demonstrates the surprising durability and stability of care repertoires across distance and class. Despite the great differences of their migration geographies and family resources, these families nonetheless all demonstrate remarkably similar repertoires of caregiving articulated with reference to similar cultural scripts. We argue that the mobility of family members both within China and across international borders transforms practices of intergenerational care, yet in both types of mobile family intergenerational care circulation is now predominantly characterized by descending asymmetry whereby grandparents provide more care than they receive. This finding also spotlights how migration, whether domestic or international, intensifies the seldom acknowledged costs that grandparents incur in taking on childcare, such as negative impacts on their earnings, comfort, leisure time and other relationships.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
7-1-2025
Volume
73
Issue
4 Obligated to Care: Intergenerational Family Relations in Contemporary China
Publication Title
American Sociological Review
Publisher
Sage
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
82690
Funders
Australian Research Council / University of Oxford John Fell Fund / Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Grant Number
ARC Number : DP160102552
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
First Page
807
Last Page
825
Comments
Stevens, C., Murphy, R., Huang, Y., & Baldassar, L. (2025). Descending asymmetry in proximate, mobile and digital care: Chinese older people grandparenting across distance within China and overseas. The Sociological Review, 73(4), 807–825. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261251347746