ABSTRACT
As has been discussed throughout this book, attention to ‘global’ family care has been dominated by accounts of the disruption of family caregiving relations. The primary example documents the flow of mothers away from their own children in the global south in order to offer care for the children and families of the global north, thereby earning higher incomes but at the expense of the maternal care of their own children (e.g., Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2005a). These are important insights into contemporary experiences of mobility and care in an unequal world. However, in this chapter, we point to an alternative experience of global family care, one in which the members of the global north do not necessarily benefit from the low-cost labour of the global south, and in which migrants and their kin move across national borders in order to provide informal, unpaid care to each other, rather than provide paid care to the families of wealthier others. It is our intention to use these examples to demonstrate that there are additional forms of global care to the care chain scenarios and that these circuits of care sometimes intersect with, and sometimes run parallel to, the global care chains identified by other scholars.
