Reconsidering the pathway to adulthood at the intersection of family care and migration

This article advances family care as an analytical concept for understanding how young migrants from Tajikistan construct adulthood through labor migration to Russia. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews and eight focus groups conducted in Russia and Tajikistan between 2016 and 2018, we argue that adulthood among young Tajikistani labor migrants is constructed through family care: Endurance, sacrifice, and provision through which young people sustain their families and claim adult standing across transnational space. Unlike transnational care, moral economy, or family obligation, family care designates what care does to the one who performs it: The mechanism of status transformation through which a young migrant becomes, in their own eyes and those of their kin, an adult. This distinction reveals migration not as an individual economic strategy but as a family project embedded in the social fabric of Tajikistani society, where transitions to adulthood are inseparable from the fulfillment of care obligations across generations and distance. The analysis shows this process is deeply gendered: Young men and women construct adulthood through care along different pathways, under different structural constraints, and with different consequences upon return. By centering family care as an analytical lens, the article contributes to non-Western conceptualizations of the life course and to debates on youth migration, gender, and adulthood beyond Western developmental models.