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1 Introduction

This chapter examines the trajectories of situated transnational parenting among migrants in Sweden from two East European post-socialist countries, Poland and Romania. By employing the theoretical model of situated transnational caregiving arrangements (Kilkey and Merla 2014), combined with analytical concepts of the life course perspective (Elder 1998; Brannen and Nilsen 2013; Wingens et al. 2011), the chapter explores the decisions to migrate, caregiving arrangements with children at a distance and the decision to reunite. Mirroring wider European tendencies, most of the recent arrivals to Sweden and other Nordic countries are from Poland, and lately from Romania, two countries that have been deeply impacted by emigration and circular labour mobility since the enlargement (Friberg and Eldring 2013; Delmi 2016).

Research on transnational parenting is a specific field within a much broader and well-established area of studies on transnational families, which until fairly recently, has mainly been concerned with transnational families in the North American context (Parrenas 2005; Carling et al. 2012). Rapidly growing research on families across European borders (Moskal 2011; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012), and more specifically on motherhood (Astilean 2016; Xhaho and Caro 2016; Ducu 2014) and fatherhood (Perrons et al. 2010; Pustulka et al. 2015), has brought to our attention that since 2004, mobility and migration between east and west of the EU became a life strategy for hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are parents. Escaping precarious economic conditions and significantly downsized welfare states, characterized by implicit familialism (Jarovnik 2014), parents make the decision to migrate not only to search for better incomes and employment opportunities, but also to improve life chances for themselves and their families. The context of the post-accession Europe, with a particular focus on Nordic societies, thus presents a unique empirical and theoretical case to interrogate the question of what constitutes a transnational family life and caregiving at a distance (White 2010; Bell and Bivand Erdal 2015).

The notion of care is a central feature of family practices neatly associated with ‘doing family’. Caregiving and care receiving in all families bind family members of different generations together through the exchange or expectation of reciprocity, obligation, trust and love, but these processes can also produce tensions and unequal power relations (Baldassar and Merla 2013). In transnational families, relations around care have been regarded as a sign of continuity of “familyhood” (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002:3), and a glue to its enduring ties. With increased mobility and improvements in travel and communication technologies, transnational families and caregiving arrangements have been celebrated as “transnationalism from below” (Baldassar and Merla 2013:33). However, due to a growing awareness of the limits to migrant transnationalism, it has been acknowledged that for many parents who migrate in pursuit of better livelihoods, engagement in transnational care practices “mostly takes the contours of a forced transnationality” (Bonizzoni and Boccagni 2013:85). Thus, the viability of transnational care practices depends not only on individual strategies of migrating parents, their sense of obligations and accumulated commitments to their kin, but also, to a greater extent, on how these strategies are capacitated within the specific national circumstances in which migrating parents operate.

Following the critical insights outlined above, we focus our analysis on caregiving arrangements within families, where one or both parents migrate to Sweden for work, while their children initially remain at home. ‘Living apart together’ is primarily regarded by researchers to be a temporary form of transnational family life, and indeed, most of the parents we interviewed during the project have, after some period of time, brought the family along and settled in Sweden, which is usually perceived as a ‘family friendly’, equal and inclusive society (Widding Isaksen 2010). However, we have chosen to focus on this particular stage of “doing family” across borders because it allows us to tease out what happens to the care dynamics and negotiations regarding caregiving within the families and its networks when their everyday lives are embedded in more than one national context over a considerable period of time. The chapter proceeds as follows. We begin by introducing the theoretical framework of situated transnationalism and the contribution that a life course perspective makes to our understanding of transnational caregiving arrangements. Thereafter, we outline our methodology and describe the rational for the choice of empirical cases illustrating our findings. Moving on to the analysis, we present a historical background to the Polish and Romanian generations on the move, including their mobility to Sweden. We discuss our findings in three sub-sections. In the first, we deal with the questions of how and why parents make the decision to move and arrange care at a distance. In the second, we analyse how caregiving arrangements are practiced at a distance, and resources that are required. Finally, we discuss how care relationships change through the trajectory of transnational parenting, particularly in relation to decisions to reunite in Sweden. The chapter concludes by highlighting critical dimensions that the theoretical model of situated transnational caregiving and the life course perspective bring into research on transnational parenting.

2 Situated Transnationalism Through a Life Course Perspective: A Theoretical Framework

There is continuing debate within a vast scholarship on transnational families pointing out that class, gender norms and global social inequalities, as well as in the context of the EU, pose significant challenges to the circulation of transnational care (Carling et al. 2012; Perrons et al. 2010; Ducu and Telegdi-Csetri 2016). The model of situated transnationalism by Kilkey and Merla (2014) attempts to embrace a great number of these challenges in a systematic way. Central to their argument is an understanding that institutional contexts, in which migrants with parental obligations are embedded, are of crucial importance to their capabilities to access recourses in order to arrange care across national borders. This model identifies institutional opportunity structures, as well as constraints with specific relevance to transnational parenting, generated within the institutional regimes for care, work, migration, communication, welfare and transportation in both the host and home societies of labour migrants (Kilkey and Merla 2014:7).

In contrast to previous studies with a predominant focus on the migrating parents per se, and migrating mothers in particular, the model includes both mobile and immobile care providers and receivers. Mobility can occur by short-term visits, long-term re/expatriation and circulation within family networks. Kilkey and Merla (ibid.:4) identify spatial and temporal aspects of transnational caregiving that significantly structure the types of involvement into care provision, including direct provision of care, coordination and delegation of care activities. However, institutions are not the sole factor. Rather, the individual agency of migrant parents in close affinity with families’ negotiated commitments and a sense of obligation are the key factors in configuring caregiving arrangements (Baldassar 2007).

Each type of involvement into transnational care requires a different set of resources that makes it possible for parents to provide different levels of support. For instance, to provide care directly with physical co-presence, parents require mobility and time, as well as finances, to travel and to nurture social relations of mutual trust and obligation. Coordination and/or direct provision at a distance first require communication and time to organize the support that is needed, as well as finances, knowledge, social relations and appropriate housing. Various types of delegation of care to others also require resources, where both finances and social relations are crucial.

What the model does not account for are the dynamics and fluidity in parental care strategies that bring to the fore aspects of time and historical contexts in which migration takes place, specific stages in migration, work and family trajectories, age of the caregiver and receiver, and the quality of mutual interaction between them. These dimensions become crucial when we analyse the intertwining of structural and individual factors that affect migrant parent–child relationships within a transnational space. To elucidate the dynamic and fluid nature of mobilities in which the recent European migrants in Sweden are involved, we expand the insights from the situated transnationalism model to include concepts of the life course perspective. The key idea of the sociological life course perspective stems from the complex “interrelationships of societal structuring forces and biographical plans and actions in historical course of time” (Wingens et al. 2011:6). The theoretical underpinnings of the life course perspective derive from a seminal study of child development during the Great Depression carried out by Elder (1998). Elder’s original conceptualisation of the life course approach presents a highly complex research paradigm that consists of various interconnected assumptions, principles and concepts. The four main principles defined by Elder (1998) are historical time and place, timing in lives, linked lives and human agency (Elder 1998:3–4). Analytical tools from the life course perspective that allow the mapping of ongoing changes in family dynamics across time include cohort, trajectory, life events, turning points and transition. In this chapter, the trajectory of transnational parenting includes the decisions to migrate and the phases of initial separation, living apart together and reuniting (see more in Wingens et al. 2011:13–14; Brannen and Nilsen 2013:11–14).

3 Methodology

This chapter draws on the findings from a broader research projectFootnote 1 on the caregiving strategies within families of recent EU labour migrants in Sweden who were exercising the right to free movement as a result of EU enlargements in 2004 and 2007. The empirical data used in this chapter come from qualitative interviews with 22 parentsFootnote 2 who migrated from Poland (11), Romania (10) and Latvia (1) to Sweden as a lead or joining parent.

The interviews were conducted between September 2015 and January 2017 in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Our sample was composed of slightly more migrant mothers (13) than migrant fathers (9). The majority of our respondents (17) were lead movers (7 women and 10 men), and three women were joining parents. The age of the participants varied from the early 30s to the early 50s. At the moment of the interview, three parents were divorced (all of them mothers), and most of the respondents had two to three children ranging in age between 8 months and 27 years.Footnote 3 Most of the respondents had a college education, but only a few were highly educated. A larger group of parents had been employed prior to migration to Sweden, mainly in low-income occupations. Some parents, mainly mothers, were stay-at-home parents. In Sweden, we found that most of the parents were within an increasingly booming sector of the lower-income and qualified jobs, with clearly gendered patterns: men working in the construction and building industries, and women working in domestic services, cleaning, hotel industries, food production, etc.Footnote 4

For the purpose of this chapter, we analyse a few purposeful selected cases. Inspired by Smart (2007:42), we argue that “a few lives – purposively selected – can capture a complex picture of social change and connections with networks of kin”. To present a plurality of the transnational caregiving arrangements and a variety of interdependencies between family members in the course of migration, our focus is on three main strategies of transnational parenting, all of which result in reunification of families in Sweden after some period of time. The first strategy, represented by Amelia and Nicolae from Romania, is the one of jointly migrating couples who delegate the daily personal care of their children to close relatives in the home country. The second, represented by Ada from Poland, is the mother migrating for work as the lead mover while the other parent stays with the children in the home country. The family of David (lead mover) and his wife Diana (second mover), also from Poland, illustrates the third strategy, in which the father moves first while their spouse and children initially remain back home. Our primary focus on these three strategies does not entirely exhaust other trajectories of the situated transnational parenting identified in our sample. However, giving priority to these three strategies helps us to delineate important life events and transitions also emerging in other migrant stories, yet at the same time, allows us to delve into the complexity and diversification of transnational family lives ending with reunification in Sweden.

4 A Generation on the Move – Polish and Romanian Migrants in the EU

The mobility patterns from Poland and Romania within the EU free movement space serve as a broader frame for migration trajectories of the whole cohort of post-accession migrants in the EU. Poland and Romania, where most of our respondents originate from, are two formerly state socialist countries, which during the last two and a half decades, have experienced profound societal transformations on the path from authoritarian and centrally planned economic to democratic and capitalist regimes. One signifying feature of these transformations is an increasing propensity to move and seek paid employment in other, more prosperous European countries, which some researchers have described as a phenomenon of A Continent Moving West? (Black et al. 2010). Although sharing several common societal and economic patterns in their historical past, these two countries represent quite different heritages when it comes to migration.

Poland had been a significant sending country of migrant labour both to Europe and globally even prior the collapse of communism, where many people crossed borders, mainly illegally and for a short time, in order “to accumulate goods and money” (Iglicka 2000:72) to be spent at home. In Romania, on the other hand, emigration was strictly limited and controlled by the state before the fall of the Iron Curtain (Anghel 2013; Andrén and Roman 2014). One of the most signifying features of the fall of communism was an enhanced opportunity for millions of Central and Eastern Europeans (CEE)Footnote 5 to travel and seek paid employment in the West. Both Polish and Romanian migration for work intensified during the 1990s, and culminated after both countries joined the EU; however, this occurred with some delay because Romania joined the EU 3 years after Poland (Fihel et al. 2012; Andrén and Roman 2014).Footnote 6 Several authors attribute increasing mobility within the EU to the unprecedented differences in living standards, the declining welfare states, and disparities in employment possibilities and wages between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU member states (Black et al. 2010; Perrons et al. 2010). Another aspect underlined in the research on Poles and Romanians at their destinations is that the ethnic networks of the established co-nationals play a crucial role as magnets for mobility (Ryan et al. 2009; Anghel 2013).

4.1 Sweden as a Destination Country

Along with other Nordic welfare states, Sweden is a relatively new destination country for post-2004 mobile workers. Mobility from CEE peaked in 2008, but continued to grow several years after the economic crisis (Friberg and Eldring 2013:24–25). In all Nordic countries, more than 600,000 workers from the new EU member states are estimated to have entered the labour market between 2004 and 2011 (Friberg and Eldring 2013:12). In Sweden alone, statistics from 2008 indicate that 40,000 individuals originating from some of the CEE countries were registered as settled migrants. If the number of registered non-settled workers is added, the figure is more than doubled (ibid.:29). In 2013, 28 EU nationals comprised almost 23% of all new immigrants arriving and registering in Sweden (Hassel and Wagner 2016:84). According to Delmi (2016), among nationals from 28 EU countries residing in Sweden in 2016, 89,000 were born in Poland and 28,000 in Romania. To these should be added approximately 19,000 children and young people born in Poland and Romania residing in Sweden together with their families (SCB 2015). The fact that male and female migrants are equally represented among the adults migrating from Poland and Romania, together with a growing number of children from these countries residing in Sweden, reflects an important pattern in the post-accession mobility, namely that many families tend to reunite in Sweden.

5 Trajectories of Situated Transnational Parenting

5.1 Decisions to Migrate – Negotiations of Intergenerational Care Responsibilities

The starting point of the trajectories of transnational parenting can be traced back to a number of significant episodes in migrant parents’ lives leading to the decision to migrate (Wingens et al. 2011). Following the theoretical principle of historical time and space, we understand the decision to migrate as a personal event embedded in a specific historical time and geographic space. Thus, being a part of a larger cohort on the move, the migrant parents interviewed in our project made their decisions to migrate against the backdrop of major economic upheavals in Poland and Romania. In fact, many parents reckon that they were forced to migrate due to the loss of employment, economic shortages, poor housing conditions, and the post-socialist states’ withdrawal from providing health and childcare, all amounting to what Pine (2014) describes as “loss of opportunity and abandonment of hope for entire populations” in the post-socialist space. Seen in this way, every individual decision to migrate becomes part of a collective strategy among a whole generation on the move, rather than a strategy of individual parents.

At the same time, as King et al. (2006) suggest, migration decisions should not be seen as single acts of relocation from one country to another, but rather as complex negotiation processes, where individual motives relate to changing opportunities and constraints within transnational institutional settings, including the regimes of welfare, migration, work and care. For families with dependent children, migration decisions are also negotiated as caregiving contracts, according to our results, through which migrant parents are given a “license to leave” (Baldassar 2007:393). Spouses, older children and other kin remaining in charge of children’s care needs back home have a significant role within the intergenerational networks of mutual obligations that many migrants are highly dependent on (Finch and Mason 1993).

Amelia and Nicolae’s migration trajectory began at a specific moment of their life course as a young couple without kids. In 2007, Amelia, then a young university student without financial resources to finish her studies, met her husband in Spain, where she was able to go, because of the opening of the European borders, and pursue a travel adventure she had always dreamt of. Together they lived a vagabond kind of life, visiting different countries for 2 weeks at a time, sleeping in the rough and getting food and clothes through Christian and other Non Governmental Organizations(NGOs) in different European countries, including Sweden. While circulating between Romania, Finland and Sweden, the couple became parents to two children. In summer 2012, when Amelia was pregnant with their third child, the family had to go back to Romania and move in with Nicolae’s relatives. The parents also realised that their older son had special needs that they could not properly address while living such an unstable life. For them, leaving Romania for a third time was done for obvious reasons:

The problem was that there was not enough space for all of us. There were only two persons [in the household] working in the winter, autumn and spring time. So, having about two, four, five hundred Euro for thirteen persons, think about it. It has been very difficult. …And a lot of diapers for the kids. So it has been very difficult. [The relatives] said that we needed to do something because they had no chance to take us for a longer time. So, we said we need to go.

As with many other young couples with kids, Amelia and Nicolae lacked support from the Romanian welfare state (Basten and Frejka 2015; Ducu and Telegdi-Csetri 2016). At the same time, weak job opportunities and no housing of their own put them in a precarious situation. In addition, their extended family did not have the capacity to support them financially in the long run. Repeated migration to Sweden, facilitated by the European free mobility regime, has thus been the only available option. The choice of Sweden was also motivated by their previous experience of it being friendlier towards migrants compared with other EU states.

Another type of strategy for parents with small children is represented by Ada, who, similar to many other Poles, migrated in search of a steady or at least a better paid job abroad (White 2010). Ada and her husband were both working, but their incomes were not enough to earn a living for a family with a small child. They were dependent on their parents to manage their everyday expenses. Initially, Ada’s motive for migration was to gain financial independence from her parents and parents-in-law, and to save enough money to be able to move to another city in Poland. At the time, in 2003, it was rare that mothers with young children migrated first. Calculating the risks of her eventual move to Sweden, Ada and her husband reasoned that for a family as a whole, it was less of a hazard for her to leave her underpaid job than for her husband to do the same. He had more secure employment and was the main bread-winner at the time. Strong care obligations and informal networks in Sweden facilitating a job offer as a cleaner in private houses in Sweden were decisive for her motives to migrate. As with many other migrant mothers, she was hoping to return soon because she considered migration “an intensive saving project” (Wall and Bolzman 2013:69).

The family of David and Diana from Poland represents the third and more long-standing strategy of transnational parenting, when the bread-winner father migrates first and leaves his family behind (Perrons et al. 2010; Wall and Bolzman 2013). David has been a bread-winning father at a distance since the 1980s. Similar to other parents in our sample, David considered his migration a necessary part of life: to earn bread, as he called it. Working as a teacher at a building college, he earned too little to provide financially for a family with three kids. He came to Sweden in 2006 and easily found a job in construction through an online advertisement. Although the job was informal, without a contract or a registration with the Swedish authorities, he did not complain. His Swedish employer valued him as a good worker, and he did not lack either the time or finances to live as a frequent ‘reappearer’ back in Poland (Kilkey and Merla 2014).

As indicated earlier, decisions to migrate were also the results of negotiations processes between parents and/or within intergenerational networks of support (Finch and Mason 1993). According to the principle of linked lives, migration was triggered by events in the lives of parents and even dependent children (Wingens et al. 2011). As other research confirms, children are often informed about parents’ migration, but parents act on their own perceptions of children’s needs without actively engaging children in the decision-making (Bushin 2009; Moskal 2011). Applying the principle of timing in lives also illustrates the importance of children’s age for how understandable the decisions to migrate are for them. Both Ada and Amelia and Nicolae left their 2-year-old kids back home when they migrated. Given the low competency of small children in migration decision-making (Bushin 2009), Amelia and Nicolae, as other parents with small kids, described the decision to leave their 2-year old child with relatives as a result of a complex negotiation process situated within their intergenerational network. Amelia recalled:

We’ve been thinking and speaking and fighting about the kids and about our leaving Romania again. How should we do it, whom should we leave behind? We wanted to leave the boy in Romania because he was the one with troubles and to send him money to go to the doctor.

Nicolae added with concern:

[We wanted] to make his life easier. So that he wouldn’t need to sleep in the station (in Gothenburg) with us.

Describing the difficult negotiation process of leaving their daughter with the extended family, Amelia admitted:

[Nicolae’s] sister and her husband said they are not able to take care of a child who is ill, so they suggested we could leave the girl behind. They ensured: Let her stay with us because we will take care of her.

Leaving a small child behind felt like abandoning her, which is a common theme in many other interviews we collected, as well as in the existing research (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012; Wall and Bolzman 2013; Ducu 2014; Rentea and Rotarescu 2016). In the context of cuts in public expenditure on care and the weakening responsibility on behalf of post-socialist welfare states, the negotiation processes regarding migration are situated within the discourse of necessity rather than opportunity (Wall and Bolzman 2013). Respondents’ inclusion into the Swedish labour market and welfare services is also highly conditional, and based on their earlier experiences, Amelia and Nicolae knew that the Swedish authorities would not support families without formal job contracts and residence permits. Denied the possibility of leaving their older son with relatives, the only option was to bring him back with them to Sweden in the hopes of establishing a better base for the whole family to reunite.

Negotiations in the families when one of the parents leaves first is anchored primarily in the nuclear family between the father and a mother (Wall and Bolzman 2013). In Ada’s case, the grandmothers on both sides were actively involved in direct care for their 2-year-old grandson while the father was working. The grandparent’s involvement in caring for the grandchild intensified even more during the 6 months when both Ada and her husband took a step to establish their family life in Sweden. Remembering her arrival to Sweden, Ada spoke more in terms of emotional suffering:

[…] It is not possible to describe in words, I felt very bad, I was sitting on a bed in a small flat owned by people who I did not even know, and my son was left in Poland. I will never be able to forget this day.

The emotional suffering and transition from providing care through physical co-presence toward providing care at a distance and coordination via grandparents seemed to be harder for Ada and other mothers migrating first (Pustulka et al. 2015; Rentea and Rotarescu 2016). In David and Diana’s case, the negotiations regarding David’s migration followed a normative male bread-winner model, where David still was the primary bread-winner, and Diana remained in Poland to take care of three teenage children with a low-paying job on the side. According to Diana, the daughters were old enough to understand why their father was leaving. Besides, they were used to him being absent and the mother always being there. As other researchers reveal, the mother’s role transition from primary caregiver to bread-winner can be much more challenging, both personally and societally, compared with fathers, who continue to carry the role of bread-winner both before and after migration (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012; Kilkey and Merla 2014).

5.2 Caregiving Arrangements at a Distance

In the following, we analyse caregiving arrangements during the time when migrant parents lived separate from their children using the specific typology of care involvement as delegation, coordination and/or direct provision at a distance or with physical co-presence developed by Kilkey and Merla (2014). As the authors underline, providing care at a distance requires various resources, most important of which are finances, time, communication capabilities and an opportunity to be mobile (ibid.) While acknowledging the importance of these particular recourses, we argue that one of the key prerequisites for care to be exchanged is what we call a mutual agreement on giving and receiving care. The mutual agreement is especially important for the direct exchange of emotional support, information, disciplining, etc., between the migrant parent and a child. Moreover, using the theoretical principles of linked lives and timing in lives (Elder 1998; Wingens et al. 2011), we also argue that in addition to mutual interaction as an important resource for transnational parenting, child’s age and agency should also be considered equally important.

Delegating care to other relatives is much more common when both parents migrate (Kilkey and Merla 2014), as in the case of Amelia and Nicolae. During 2 years of separation from their young daughter, they did not always have financial or communication resources to talk to her or support her directly. While they did ‘care about her’ (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012), their role was mainly to coordinate her nutrition and her upbringing, relying on Nicolae’s sister and mother as the primary carers. Amelia’s communicative skills and her persistence in looking for any available help from Swedish society led her after a longer period of informality to her first contracted job, paid per hour. Along with still unreliable but official employment, it was the support from Christian civil society organizations in Gothenburg that became crucial for the parents, allowing them to borrow a computer to talk to their daughter, the grandmother and the aunt by Skype.

Ada contributed to the well-being of her son mainly by coordinating care through her husband once a week using cheap telephone cards. Transnational parenting for David and Diana was also complicated in David’s earlier migration experiences, as they lacked smooth communication opportunities and did not have a telephone in their home in Poland. During that time, David called home from a telephone box, while Diana had to travel 70 km every week to borrow a phone from a friend. For David and Ada, the only way to communicate with their children was via their respective spouses. Another similarity in their stories was that children in both families refused or were reluctant to participate in direct communication with the migrant parent, despite the age difference – Ada’s son being 2 years old and David’s daughters being between age 10 and the late teens. Children’s reactions are supported in other studies that show their competences situated and negotiated, rather than being age-specific only (Bushin 2009; Wall and Bolzman 2013). Without an agreement from a child on receiving care from the parent, direct provision of care was not possible. As Ada expressed:

I tried to talk to my son. You know, that was the worst thing. He thought that I ran away, so he did not want to talk to me.

When asking David about how it was for him to be a father at a distance, he reflected:

It is difficult. You lose contact. I felt that the girls always needed their mother more than their father. They did not miss me in a way.

In David’s case, as in the case of many other migrant bread-winner fathers, repeated separation since early childhood led to weakening emotional ties and the normalization of his absence. Through the lens of the linked lives principle (Wingens et al. 2011), and along the bulk of research on migrant fathers (Pustulka et al. 2015), it is possible to argue that while financial resources have a predominant role when fathers decide to migrate, it is mutual agreement on interaction and care across borders that become paramount in the long run.

Sending remittances is one of the most central care obligations among transnational parents (Bell and Bivand Erdal 2015). Initially, having just started their trajectory as transnational parents, and before securing paid employment in Sweden, they could send no or very little money back home. The most important resources during this stage of situated transnational parenting were social relations with co-ethnics who helped them enter the Swedish labour market, even if under informal conditions. Ada, as well as David, went to the locations where the Polish community was well established. For many newcomers, as for Ada, the Polish community could provide a job offer, information and a place to stay (see also Ryan et al. 2009). David, on the other hand, found his first job in Sweden through an advertisement on the internet posted by a Swedish employer. Amelia and Nicolae had a much harder time finding employment in Sweden, as they arrived in the country soon after the economic crisis and without any financial resources of their own. Living in extreme precarity in an initial phase, they had to rely on support from a Christian NGO that helped them send food and second-hand clothes back to their child in Romania.

In order not to miss out on the lives of their children too much, migrant parents strive to combine the important moments of “staying in touch” (Baldassar 2007:391) with regular, even if not frequent, visits back home. Providing emotional, moral, practical and other types of care by being physically present during home visits is for many migrant parents “a tangible manifestation of persisting connection” (Bell and Bivand Erdal 2015:87). By applying the principle of linked lives, we can better understand the need for connectedness, emotional closeness and a mutual interest for interaction as vital recourses for transnational care at a distance. Respondents who lived in Sweden during a longer period of time witnessed quickly changing landscapes of technology, transportation and communication facilities, which on the one hand, improved their capacity to ‘stay in touch.’ Ada, for instance, managed to visit her child and the rest of her family twice, at Easter and Christmas, during her first year working informally in Sweden. Poland, still being outside the EU in 2003, was easily reachable from Sweden by ferry. At the same time, Ada could not risk being deported: if she were to be checked at border control, it would show that she had overstayed her visiting time as a ‘tourist.’ Travelling from Poland to Sweden was still too expensive for her husband and child. David, who arrived in Sweden after Poland had joined the EU, could always visit his family while working abroad. As indicated above, his employer always granted him time to go home. At the same time, construction, being a type of ‘on-demand’ employment, allowed him to spend several months with his family in Poland during the ‘low seasons.’

Nowadays, travelling between Sweden and Poland or Romania is much easier and cheaper, so the only resources migrants still need are time and money for social events and family gatherings (Bell and Bivand Erdal 2015). These are exactly those resources that Amelia and Nicolae did not have during 2 years of separation from their daughter in Romania. Having no stable employment in Sweden, and thus no social assistance from the Swedish state, and two other children to care for in the country, their strategy was instead to invest as much as possible into a firmer base for the family in Sweden before bringing their daughter over. To reunite with children and spouses in Sweden is still complicated for many of the parents we talked to, especially those who lack their own housing and a private space in which to accommodate a family.

5.3 Negotiating Reunification

Several studies observe that “family separation affects migrant parents in many ways” (Fresnoza-Flot 2014:3). Starting as a temporary project, mobility within the EU seems to become more permanent when many migrant parents decide to settle in the destination country by relocating the whole family (White 2010). Among the respondents we interviewed, the majority have already lived in Sweden together with their families, and several of them have a new generation of children. One of the most important motives for reunification was to prevent the family from falling apart as observed elsewhere (Pustulka et al. 2015; Slany and Pustulka 2016). Another motive was difficulties with raising teenagers alone, which several remaining mothers were confined to. Reunifications were also driven by more ordinary ‘dreams’ (Pine 2014), such as to get a better life or a bigger house, or to settle in a more secure area for children to grow up in. In order to reunite in Sweden, migrant parents first needed proper housing and formal inclusion in the social security system, resources which would provide their children access to education, health care and social insurance. Getting a formal contract in the Swedish labour market was often the major event in parents’ lives opening the door for inclusion in the Swedish welfare system. Obtaining formal employment was also important for the migrants’ dependant family members to qualify for legal residence and a personal Swedish security number, which has also been shown in other research (Runfors et al. 2016). For many respondents, this personal event became a turning point in transnational caregiving arrangements. After reunification, care at distance, combined with short visits, transformed into direct care provision with physical co-presence.

Reunification processes should also be seen in the light of an emotional gap between parents and children accentuated when the decisions to migrate and live apart are negotiated (Bell and Bivand Erdal 2015). As shown in previous studies on accounts of children and parents from the Philippines reunited in France (Fresnoza-Flot 2014), these emotional gaps have long-lasting impacts on interaction and caregiving between children and parents after reunification. Living apart at a geographical distance creates emotional distance and feelings of abandonment and distrust, as many respondents reported. Amelia and Nicolae’s daughter felt abandoned and expressed at some point that Amelia did not feel like her mother anymore. She wanted to stay with her grandmother in Romania instead of following her parents to Sweden. Two years after they had reunited in Sweden, Amelia thought that the emotional bonds between them are still in need of repair.

Ada was asked about how the relationship with her son has developed since the reunification:

It is a normal relationship, but he listens more to his father, because he did not forget [the time when I left] when he spent a lot of time with his father. He sits at the computer together with his father, so the father is his favourite. If I shout at him that he should clean his room or do his homework, he goes to his father and says: I do not know what she wants?

What Ada indicates with some irony is that her son has not forgotten that she ran away from him. Their separation shaped the emotional distance, and spending time together with the father entailed an emotional closeness in their relationship long after the separation experience. Talking about the son’s preferences towards the father, Ada laughs, indicating that the relationship with her son is not that bad after all. Unlike Amelia and Nicolae, Ada did not regret the decision to migrate alone and live apart for a while. In the case of David and Diana, the relational distance between the father and daughters did not change after reunification in Sweden. David was ambivalent regarding whether the decision to relocate the whole family to Sweden was the right thing to do:

[If I would do it again] Maybe I would do it a little bit different […] it does not really work now. I think that I have lost a lot, especially contact with my children.

Echoing the decisions to migrate, the principle of timing in lives, especially the dimension of the child’s age, is important for how decisions to reunite are negotiated within families (Fresnoza-Flot 2014). The resistance to reunification was especially visible in David and Diana’s family, where the girls, already being teenagers, were reluctant to reconcile with moving to Sweden. David admits:

My daughters were in the most difficult ages to change, thirteen and fourteen years old. My wife said that it was better to wait until they finish secondary school. We did that, but after that, it was a ‘war’. During that time, my daughters were already in Sweden. They had arranged schooling and accommodation in Poland through the Internet. [It was the town we lived in] and from there, we have 4000 km to the nearest relative.

As other research observes, the child’s age plays an important role in how much power the parents have in deciding what is in the child’s best interest (Bushin 2009). The children are agents in their own right (James 2009), which shows in the fact that one of the David and Diana’s teenage daughters made her plans come true by moving back to Poland to a life with friends and a boyfriend. After a year, without sufficient economic resources to live on her own, and not being able to obtain a Swedish study loan, the daughter had to return to Sweden. Much in line with Fresnoza-Flot’s (2014:1152) findings, family reunification processes are a “bumpy landscape” many years after the actual reunion.

6 Conclusive Remarks

In conclusion, we highlight critical dimensions contributed by the theoretical model of situated transnational caregiving arrangements (Kilkey and Merla 2014) and the analytical principles and concepts of the life course perspective (Elder 1998). First, by looking through the principle historical time and space, we relate the decision to migrate to Sweden to earn a living for children and the family to the whole generation and cohort on the move that the parents belong to. The history of societal changes from a socialist economy and universal welfare toward a market economy and re-familialisation made the transition to independent adulthood and parenthood vulnerable, not the least in times of severe economic upheaval with high risk for unemployment and low income.

Second, looking at these experiences through the principle of timing in lives, migrant parents in our sample became parents at a stage when they did not have secure income or housing of their own. It is not only the age at which they became parents, which is important, but also the timing of their transition to parenthood which takes place in the historical moment of economic and political instability. Our results show that the strive for independence from their own parents remains strong in East European societies, which in many cases, pushes parents with dependent children to migrate for work.

Third, through the principle of linked lives, the caregiving arrangements of migrant parents are embedded in and dependent on social support networks of both close relatives in the home country and weaker ties of co-ethnic friends, employers and in some cases, Christian NGOs in Sweden. Transnational caregiving arrangements result from ongoing negotiated social contracts within an intergenerational network. Direct care through communicating with a child at distance is impossible to provide without an agreement from the child. Caregiving is a process of mutual but uneven exchange of care that changes depending on the age of the children. Parental caregiving at a distance is more difficult when children are too young to communicate or mature enough to decide not to reunite with their parents. A longer time of living apart seems to damage the emotional bonds between parents and children, especially when the separation occurs at an early age for the child and before it is possible to explain the reason behind it.

Finally, the principle of human agency connects to the main focus in our study, and to the theoretical model of Kilkey and Merla (2014). By applying these theoretical tools, we show that caregiving arrangements during the trajectory of transnational parenting, and the choices that parents make across time and space, are situated in ongoing changes in structural regimes of opportunities and constraints in both the home and host countries. Our results show that historical events, such as European enlargement and free mobility for EU citizens, had a great impact on the decisions to migrate to Sweden, even though their initial legal status as informal workers hindered migrant parents to practice care across borders. During this initial stage, migrant parents were practically ‘invisible’ to the welfare policies regulating the social security of EU citizens and their families within the EU and Sweden. After obtaining a formal job contract, migrant parents could qualify to be included as citizens with social rights for themselves and their families. This development led several of our informants to decide to reunite with their children and spouses in Sweden, which resulted in a transition from caregiving arrangements at distance to caregiving through physical co-presence. Therefore, reunifications in Sweden revealed an emotional gap caused by separation, making transnational parenting a particularly difficult endeavour.