Transnational grandparent migration and care-giving: a systematic scoping review

Abstract Grandparents are increasingly participating in international migration to resettle with or visit adult children and grandchildren living overseas. In doing so, they make important social, cultural, emotional and financial contributions to transnational families, in particular through providing unpaid childcare and domestic work. This scoping review aims to examine the extent, range and nature of studies on transnational grandparent migration and care-giving to provide an overview of existing research. The review was conducted in August 2022, following Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review methodology. Of 2,099 sources identified using nine databases, supplemented with manual searching (including grey literature), 65 (qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods) studies conducted between 2000 and 2022 were deemed relevant for inclusion. A descriptive analysis of study characteristics details the author(s), the (year) and the type of publication; the study population and sample size; the research objectives; the research methods; and the sending and receiving places. A thematic analysis of these studies identified key themes, including study characteristics, typologies of transnational migrant grandparents, their family roles and contributions, the uses of information and communication technologies in supporting migrant grandparents’ transnational lives, benefits gained from migration, challenges faced and strategies employed in response. The article concludes that grandparents make significant contributions to transnational families and host economies, but their roles and challenges are overlooked in national and transnational (supra-national) policies. Future research should explore the ethics of migration programmes aimed towards migrant grandparents as well as effective measures to assist grandparents to age well in transnational mobility.