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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"[In this book] The editors and contributors challenge mainstream parenting and child development scholars by drawing attention to non-typical parenting conditions that impact millions of children worldwide. Cutting across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, each chapter systematically tells stories and presents data of children raised by parents from afar in diverse family structures. Contributors tackle distinct parenting-from-afar conditions, ranging from incarcerated parents to military and refugee families to immigrant families, all in a well-balanced and appropriately-sensitive manner. This powerful volume is a must-read, pioneering compendium for scientists, practitioners, educators, interventionists, and policy makers." -- Gustavo Carlo, Millsap Professor of Diversity and Multicultural Studies and Co-Director, Center for Children and Families Across Cultures, University of Missouri "In Parenting from Afar, international scholars describe the diversity of family arrangements across physical distances, expanding our views of traditional family life, roles, and coping, as well as questioning norms and beliefs about parenting, child rearing, kinship, and the 'normal family.' Each fascinating chapter identifies the centrality of the ecocultural context for understanding family, challenging established developmental theories and setting the stage for future research that must address such diversity." -- Deborah Best, William L. Poteat Professor of Psychology, Wake Forest University "What these editors do so well is provide convincing evidence that families that are close-knit while living far apart are not only found in the 'majority world' but also exist, albeit largely ignored in the scholarly literature, across the Western Educated Industrialized Rich and democratic world. This book should be required reading for all who study 'the family.'" -- Jonathan Tudge, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro