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Title: Transnational Parenting: Child Fostering in Ghanaian Immigrant Families

Citation Type: Book, Section

Publication Year: 2012

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Abstract: Today, we are witnessing high, but not unprecedented, rates of migration across national borders and around the globe. It is widely known that this movement holds the potential to influence social and economic conditions in migrant-sending and -receiving countries. What is less commonly recognized is that contemporary flows of migration seem to be generating transnational family arrangements that may influence children’s development and well-being. Families are scattered among countries, with spouses separated and children living apart from one or both parents and their siblings for years at a time. Statistics describing the prevalence and structures of transnational families, however, are hard to come by. One study based on interviews with 385 adolescents born in China, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico living in the United States found that 85 percent had been separated from one or both parents for an extended period.1 A larger survey of 8,573 US-based immigrants who had just received legal permanent residence (LPR, known as a “green card”) and their children found that 15 percent of these immigrants’ children had been separated from at least one parent for two years or more. Separation was more common for those children who were born outside the United States: 31 percent had beenseparated from a parent.2 These statistics make it clear that separation is quite common among the children of immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. Ethnographic research suggests that parent-child separation may be more common among Black immigrants than other immigrants because of parenting traditions that distribute child care through practices known as child fostering, child circulation, or child shifting. These practices have developed in areas of West Africa and the Caribbean that have long traditions of regional migration. This chapter explores the practice of child fostering and its implications for parent-child separation among immigrants from Ghana. Like many Caribbean immigrants and some West Africans who come from politically stable countries, many Ghanaian immigrants do not raise their young children in the United States. Instead, these children are raised in their country of origin by other family members.3 Some of these children are “left behind” when a parent migrates; others are born in the United States and later sent to Ghana as infants or adolescents. Ethnographic research shows that the ages of their return to the United States vary: many do so as young adults, others when they are ready for elementary school. This chapter analyzes the reasons why many Ghanaian immigrants decide to raise their young children in Ghana. It also assesses the informal and formal social resources available to support the well-being of young children of a select group of Black immigrants in the United States.

Url: https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/45787/PDF/1/

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Authors: Coe, Cati

Editors: Capps, Randy; Fix, Michael

Pages:

Volume Title: Young Children of Black Immigrants in America: Changing Flows, Changing Faces

Publisher: Migration Policy Institute

Publisher Location: Washington D.C

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States