Floating grandparents : Rethinking family obligation and intergenerational support

Discussion of China’s internal migration typically focusses on the movement of young rural workers to cities and, correspondingly, on the women, children and elderly who remain in villages and small towns, the so-called ‘left-behind’. This chapter fills a gap in the literature by examining the situation of grandparents who join their migrant adult children to facilitate their work-force participation by providing childcare. The chapter shows how grandparents and their adult children reinterpret and negotiate intergenerational family obligation in constructing their own lives. Based on extensive interview data the chapter provides a theoretically-informed and empirically-based understanding of intergenerational relations in China’s internal labor migration.