Parenting from Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance

An increasing number of families around the world are now living apart from one another, subsequently causing the defining and redefining of their relationships, roles within the family unit, and how to effectively maintain a sense of familial cohesion through distance.

Edited by Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, Jill Brown, and Carolyn Pope Edwards, Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance uniquely highlights how families--both in times of crisis and within normative cultural practices--organize and configure themselves and their parenting through physical separation. In this volume, readers are given a unique look into the lives of families around the world that are affected by separation due to a wide range of circumstances including economic migration, fosterage, divorce, military deployment, education, and orphanhood. Contributing authors from the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, and geography all delve deep into the daily realities of these families and share insight on why they live apart from one another, how families are redefined across long distances, and the impact absence has on various members within the unit.

An especially timely volume, Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance offers readers an important understanding and examination of family life in response to social change and shifts in the caregiving context.

Maria Rosario T. de Guzman is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work focuses on the intersection of culture, migration, family life, and child and adolescent development. She is also interested in how sociocultural factors relate to children's prosocial socialization.

Jill Brown is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Creighton University. She received her BA and her PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While her roots are in the Midwest, her work has taken her to other parts of the world: she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Varanasi, India. She is the current President of the Society of Cross Cultural Research. Her current research focuses on kinship, adoption and socially distributed child care and family life, and cognition and thinking across cultures.

Carolyn Pope Edwards is Willa Cather Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Child, Youth, and Family Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her interests center on social and moral development in cultural contexts, socialization processes within the family, and international early childhood education. She has conducted research and held research positions at universities in Italy, Norway, and Kenya.

Foreword by Thomas Weisner
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Contributors

Introduction
Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, Jill Brown, and Carolyn Pope Edwards

Section 1: Economic Migration and Family Dispersal

1. Scattering Seeds in Las Orquideas: The Role of Kin Networks in Ecuadorian Parental Emigration
Heather Rae-Espinoza

2. Migration and "Skipped Generation" Households in Thailand
Berit Ingersoll-Dayton, Sureeporn Punpuing, Kanchana Tangchonlatip, & Laura Yakas

3. Fictive Kinships and the Re-Making of Family Life in the Context of Paid Domestic Work: The Case of Philippine Yayas
Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, Minerva D. Tuliao, & Aileen S. Garcia

4. Changing Country, Changing Gender Roles: Migration to Norway and the Transformation of Gender Roles Among Polish Families
Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka, Magdalena Zadkowska, Brita Gjerstad, Kuba Krys, Anna Kwiatkowska, Gunhild Odden, Oleksandr Ryndyk, Justyna Swidrak, & Gunn Vedøy

5. Parental Migration and Well-being of Left-Behind Children from a Comparative Perspective
Yao Lu

Section 2: Family Separation in the Context of Social and Political Crises

6. The Making of 'Orphans': How the 'Orphan Rescue' Movement is Transforming Family and Jeopardizing Child Wellbeing in Uganda
Kristen Cheney

7. Imagined and Occasional Co-Presence in Open Adoption: How Adoptive Parents Mediate Birth Connections
Mandi MacDonald

8. Untold Transnational Family Life on the Sonora-Arizona Border
Marcela Sotomayor-Peterson & Ana A. Lucero-Liu

9. The Experience of Families Separated by Military Deployment
Ruth Ellingsen, Catherine Mogil, & Patricia Lester

Section 3: Personal Crises and Family Dispersal

10. Children as Providers and Recipients of Support: Redefining Family Among Child-Headed Households in Namibia
Mónica Ruiz-Casares, Shelene Gentz, & Jesse Beatson

11. Parenting from Prison: The Reality and Experience of Distance
Joyce A. Arditti & Jonathon J. Beckmeyer

12. Distance Mothering: The Case of Nonresidential Mothers
Michelle Bemiller

Section 4: Family Separation as a Normative Cultural Practice and in Pursuit of Educational Opportunities

13. 'Raising Another's Child': Gifting, Communicating and Persevering in Northern Namibia
Jill Brown

14. Satellite Babies: Costs and benefits of culturally driven parent-infant separations in North American immigrant families
Yvonne Bohr, Cindy H. Liu, Stephen H. Chen, & Leslie K. Wang

15. Going the Distance: Transnational Educational Migrant Families in Korea
Sumie Okazaki & Jeehun Kim

16. Where Should My Child Go to School? Parent and Child Considerations in Binational Families
Edmund T. Hamann, Víctor Zúñiga, & Juan Sánchez García

Index