1. The Complexities of Transnational Childcare Practices among Ghanaian Families in a Context of Global Pandemic
- Author:
- Patricia Serwaa Afrifa
- Publication Date:
- 03-2024
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Ìrìnkèrindò: a Journal of African Migration
- Abstract:
- Childcare remains central in all human societies. This is because it is in children that humans invest their immortality and ensure the continuity of humanity. This partly explains the social collectivism that is brought to bear in childcare to the extent that in some indigenous African societies, the popular axiom is: "It takes a village to raise to raise a child". While the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, and the near-collapse of the extended family system across the world, including indigenous societies, have negatively impacted collective childcare, parents continue to devise creative strategies to nurture their children. The members of the Ghanaian diaspora in the United States of America (USA) often extended invitations to older members of their families, including their mothers, to join them across the Atlantic to help with nurturing their children. This practice of transnational migration of child carers was very efficient in helping children to access Ghanaian cultural values and languages, until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With the outbreak of the pandemic, one way of controlling its totalizing effect was the imposition of social distance protocols, which at the peak of the pandemic involved a global ban on all means of human crisscrossing the world. This implied that most diasporic Ghanaians had their family-dependent source of childcare supply significantly cut. This phenomenon inspired the paper. Through in-depth interviews with selected Ghanaian families in the USA through social media and phones, this paper explores the impact of the ban on transnational travel on childcare practices among Ghanaian diaspora in the USA. The key findings of the study suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic did not only cripple the economies of the world, it also blocked the alternatives available to Ghanaians to receive an additional source of care for their children.
- Topic:
- Diaspora, Family, COVID-19, Strategy, Migrants, and Child Care
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Ghana