The Wellbeing of Chinese Migrating Grandparents Supporting Adult Children: Negotiating in Home-Making Practices

Dan Zhu (), Haichao Xu and Yuan Yao
Additional contact information
Dan Zhu: Glorious Sun School of Business & Management, Donghua University, Shanghai 200051, China
Haichao Xu: Tourism College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China
Yuan Yao: Glorious Sun School of Business & Management, Donghua University, Shanghai 200051, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 16, 1-16

Abstract: Health geography provides a relational approach to understanding elders’ wellbeing experience in relation to place. That the migrating grandparents move between their home and their adult children’s home to support their children’s life in the migrating city provides a particular pattern to supplement the place-based wellbeing literature. How they negotiate their wellbeing remains to be observed in the daily home-making practices related to their two homes. This study conducted in-depth interviews with 35 migrating grandparents and nine of their adult children and conducted extensive field notes in Shanghai from 2020 to 2022. Through thematic analysis, it finds that the migrating grandparents met a series of differences, challenges and tensions in the material, social and emotional home-making practices brought by the separation and rotation between their own and their children’s homes. It weakens their physical, social and mental wellbeing. However, they take some initiatives to overcome and relieve these tensions. Therefore, accompanied by sacrifices and negotiations, they also obtain sustained material, social and spiritual–emotional values to negotiate a suboptimal experience of wellbeing. This study contributes to the intersection of elderly wellbeing and home-making studies by revealing the complex and ongoing inter-relationships between migrating grandparents and home in the rotating lifestyle.

Keywords: wellbeing; home; migrating grandparents; home-making practice; Chinese context; qualitative study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/16/9903/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/16/9903/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:16:p:9903-:d:885569

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().