Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 26

Family life is one of the most important sets of relationships within which children learn the significance of gender in all its dimensions from the psychological to the political and economic. For some children globalization has profoundly changed the structure of family life, through the expansion of global circuits of labour. These global circuits often depend on ‘regimes of labour intimacy’ (Chang and Ling 2000; Hochschild 2002) that involve women leaving their children in one country to do paid care for families in another country (see also chapter 10). In principle this shift in the organization of family life could lead to changes in the organization of gender roles: in what is expected of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. One study that explicitly addressed the impact of women’s migration on gendered orders at home found that in fact gender roles often hardened and that care done by mothers shifted to grandmothers and aunts more often than to fathers (Parreñas 2005). Furthermore the care that mothers provide for children had to continue to be done ‘at a distance’. Although both mothers and fathers migrate,

mothers are not automatically assumed to migrate for the sake of the collective mobility of the family. Therefore, mothers must perform greater work to show their children that despite the distance they do really still care for the family. This burden raises the bar in the transnational family work of migrant mothers, who find themselves responsible for both the emotional and the material well-being of their children in the Philippines. (Parreñas 2005: 66)

Parreñas’s hypothesis that gender roles would change since many fathers now had, at least in theory, primary responsibility for their children was not valid for most of her respondents. Mothers were still expected to do the emotional care for their children, and other women – neighbours and relatives – took on their physical care. One of her respondents, a 17-year-old girl, said: ‘I try to carry the burden of solving my problems on my own, because I cannot help but think that she [i.e. her mother] is already so far and I should not be there to only give her more problems’ (Parreñas 2005: 99). A few men did ‘sometimes find themselves with no choice but to adjust accordingly to their new household arrangements’ (Parreñas 2005: 103).

Commenting on the findings of research on immigrant children in Los Angeles that girls carry far more responsibility than boys in the maintenance of immigrant families, Parreñas says that this is also the case when the girls are at home and only the parent migrates. Girls translate; they do advocacy work in financial, medical and legal transactions; and they look after younger siblings. The eldest child helps younger siblings with schoolwork, helps them to get ready for school and feeds them. Daughters do more of this work than sons. Some resent it but ‘most daughters report finding they gain skills from their added responsibilities’ (Parreñas 2005: 111).