This study explores the experiences of caregivers in Transnational Child Raising Arrangements (TCRAs). It is part of a larger project which sought to examine how TCRAs affect life-chances of children who remain in the country of origin, their migrant parents and their caregivers in Ghana. It fills a lacuna in the literature on transnational parenting which have so far focused extensively on the migrant parents or the children they leave behind and the relationship between the migrants and their children. It also adds an African perspective to the discourse on transnational parenting as most of the existing studies are from Latin America and East Asia.
The study particularly looks at the characteristics of the caregivers, their expectations and the challenges that they face within the context of child fosterage and is guided by a transnational approach. It is an ethnographic study that followed the lives of 15 caregivers in a matched sample (parent, child, and caregiver) for over two years and supplemented with one-off semi structured interviews with non-matched 19 caregivers in the Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions. The study employs a conceptual framework that incorporates transnationalism, child fosterage norms and transnational care practices to make sense of the experiences of caregivers. The study found that kin constituted 88% of caregivers and most of the caregivers were
women, largely affirming studies on transnational parenting which assert that women who migrate without their children fall on other women to help with child care. There was also the emerging phenomenon of migrants hiring the services of ‘private’ caregivers. The study also observed that more men were venturing into the traditional female sphere of care giving. Six out of the thirty-four caregivers were men, out of which four were the primary caregivers of the children. Secondly, caregivers in TCRAs have to deal with parents who have the ability to provide for the material needs of their children owing to their migrant status. Thanks to technological advancements, caregivers, parents and the children can ‘live here and there’ simultaneously, and this has implications for power relations in the TCRAs. The caregivers’ right to make major decisions concerning the children’s upbringing was almost non-existent, unlike in child fosterage as practiced within internal migration settings where the foster parents
were entirely responsible for the upbringing of the child and thus the sole decision-makers of the child. The study establishes that the experiences of caregivers are largely shaped by a convergence of the norms of child fostering and transnational migration. The caregivers were caught between meeting society’s expectations of who a good caregiver is and new demands introduced through transnational migration. While traditional child fostering norms gave them greater control to raise the children, they were however restrained by parental involvement that is aided by the transnational status of the parents. The caregivers therefore had to navigate the demands that both child fosterage and transnational migration placed on them in order for their TCRAs to function properly. The study concludes among other things that caregivers are an active part of the transnational social field and their daily engagements both tangible and otherwise, aim at providing the physical and emotional needs of the children in their care as well as protecting the migrants from anxieties that may be engendered by the separation. In view of this, it is recommended for more attention to be paid to the perspectives of caregivers both in research and policy. The study further recommends that caregivers and migrants should endeavor to discuss the terms of the care arrangements – be they remittances, expectations of support from the migrants, or the duration of the care arrangement- to reduce the burdens that non-communication of these place on the caregivers.