Abstract

ISAKSEN, Lise; DEVI, Uma  and  HOCHSCHILD, Arlie. Global care crisis: Mother and child’s-eye view. Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas [online]. 2008, n.56, pp.61-83. ISSN 0873-6529.

Female migrant workers send money they earn in affluent homes of the North to their poor and middle class families in the South. As money flows south, caring labor flows north, creating a “care drain” in the South. Yet, we often hear the emotional story of care recipients of the North and the economic story of care givers from the South. Drawing on recent scholarship on the children of migrant workers in Costa Rica, the Philippines and Kerala, India, we explore the many ways in which such children receive care, and the emotional tasks they often face: to manage doubt as to why one’s mother left, sadness at her absence, envy of children with non-migrant mothers, and ambivalence about material gifts. Many - in both the South and North - suppress the children’s experience, normalize it, or discuss it as a private matter of a mother’s morality. But the care drain is, among other things, a tragic hidden injury that results from our social failure to find better ways to fairly distribute the wealth of the globe.

Keywords : global care; migrant mothers; children; caregivers.

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