Grandparenting in migration : Childcare practices of rural-urban migrant elderly in China

Childcare support tends to be regarded as a normative duty of grandparents in China (Lin and Mao, 2022). Increasingly grandparents from rural areas relocate to cities to provide child care for their adult children. Qi (2018; 2021) terms these grandparents ‘floating grandparents’. After arriving in Shenzhen, the rural grandparents may join both middle-class and low-income families, depending on their adult children's social status. There are limited studies which explore floating grandparents, negotiation of family duties, grandparenting practices, in particular, gender practices and class. This study was based on 49 qualitative in-depth interviews with rural-urban migrant grandmothers and grandfathers who moved to Shenzhen to assist with childrearing. Inspired by the doing family approach, this thesis explores how grandparents fulfill their childcare duties after migration by analyzing intergenerational cooperation practices, grandparents’ practices of balancing economic activities and childcare roles, as well as grandfathers’ construction of masculinity among rural migrant grandfathers. The diversity of floating grandparenting is embedded not only in the social disparity between rural and urban, but also in the social status of their adult children. This PhD thesis contributes to the study of grandparenting by identifying key differences in grandparenting practices and the negotiation of family roles between rural grandparents with low-income adult children versus those with affluent adult children. Moreover, this study also contributes to studies by exploring rural floating grandfathers’ differing practices in negotiating caregiving roles and aging masculinity.