Parenting from a Distance: The Shifting Topology of Care in the Net Era

Abstract

As largely assessed by the emergent studies on polymedia environment, ICT consumption among migrants and their relatives left-behind represent an essential feature in the current transnational family patterns. Especially in mother-child relations, ICT-mediated interactions endorse significant mothering practices within a deterritorialized framework and attenuate emotional discontinuities typically framed in transnational mother-child dyad. The study builds on the ethnographic field of female care migration from Eastern Europe and particularly addresses the polarized family arrangement of migrant mothers leaving their children behind to settle in Italy as live-in domestic workers. The empirical research highlights that ICT ubiquitous regimes allow live-in domestic workers to temporarily be on the sideline of the live-in care arrangement and reorient care practices towards their utmost significant ones in their homeland. Analysis draw attention on the ubiquitous connected-presences that domestic migrants manage to perform and cast a light on the development of ordinary ITC-mediated routines as a means to provide emotional support and monitor children left-behind. By putting an emphasis on family practices across a distance, migrant mothers assess in many ways that the relation between proximity and distance in mothering has become more complex, challenging the normative conceptualization of care and familyhood as exclusively relying on proximate and face-to-face care scenarios.