What causes the demand for paid migrant domestic workers in middle- and upperclass

households? What are the consequences for families left behind as described by Parrenas?

Melisa Yilmaz-137611

In the middle and upper class, the need for female workers who will take care of domestic
work leads to increased demand, especially for immigrant women. This leads to the formation
of a transnational parenting and motherhood situation. According to the claim and data put
forward by Parrenas, children growing up in families left behind by family members who
migrated to other places to work express that they are physically and emotionally deprived of
some cares. Children of immigrant mothers experience more feelings of abandonment than
children of immigrant fathers. However, according to Parrenas, the source of this deprivation
is not directly related to the phenomenon of migration or the emigration of mothers/fathers,
but rather to the established judgments in the society about the care. In other words, children
growing up in these families experience deprivation, because they do not receive the care to
be expected by the migrating mother. For example, as Parrenas points out, some fathers
refuse to do some of the "feminine" housework that mothers used to do. And of course,
children feel the lack of these chores that are not done, with the absence of the mother who
should be doing the chores. In this case, the care duties and emotional support performed by
the mothers are attributed by the children left behind to the other female relatives, not the
fathers. In other words, while fathers refuse to do housework, the distant mother continues to
work more, and female relatives at home continue to take on more caring duties. Similarly,
society and newspaper reports tend to attribute psychological problems and other problems
related to children left behind to migrant mothers, and they define women's migration to work
as the abandonment of children. Parrenas' claim does not reject these difficulties, but tends to
propose women's migration against all these trends as a movement to socially reconstruct
maternity stereotypes, in other words, as an opportunity for social resistance or redefinition of
gender norms. The author thinks that social resistance to mothers' migration and work can be
reduced by changes that may occur in the static structure of the family institution.

Focused reading:

Geisen, T., & Parreñas, R. (2013). Transnational mothering: A source of gender conflict in the family.
In Migration, familie und soziale lage (pp. 169-194). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden.