Professor Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford

This seminar draws on a section of Rachel Murphy’s book, The Children of China’s Great Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2020). It explores children’s navigation of their relationship with significant adults in skipped generation families, which is families where both parents worked away in the cities while the children stayed in the countryside in the care of (paternal) grandparents. The analysis adapts Ester Goh’s (2011) concept of ‘intergenerational parenting coalitions’ in seeing the migrant parents and the grandparent caregivers as forming ‘multi-local intergenerational parenting coalitions’. The talk explores heterogeneity in children’s experiences of growing up in these skipped generation families.