The prevalent image of grandparents as essentially caring and loving obscures the interactional work required to do grandparenthood. This study draws on 24 in-depth interviews with adult children and older parents in Chinese immigrant families to understand how older immigrants become grandparents through the negotiations of childcare work. Adult children and older parents provide different accounts of the motivations, practices, conflicts, and negotiations in childcare work, which reveals three major findings. First, older parents are expected to provide financial or physical help with childcare. When refused to help, they violate the common expectations of being loving grandparents and they are held accountable for not doing grandparenthood right. Second, older parents are aware of the interaction work required to distinguish parents from grandparents. They recognize that both parents and grandparents can love the grandchildren, but only the parents have the ultimate power to discipline the grandchildren. By managing the boundaries of everyday childrearing practices, older parents learn to perform proper grandparenthood. Third, older parents do grandparenthood differently based on gender. Grandmothers tend to perform intensive carework at home, while grandfathers are more likely to do limited house chores or experience a feeling of lost in their role as grandfather. Fourth, immigrant grandparents’ involvements in raising American-born English-speaking grandchildren reinforce their identity as immigrants and ethnic Chinese. Overall, this study reveals the hidden interactional work of being immigrant grandparents. It calls for further studies on the social constructions of grandparenthood based on gender, age, ethnicity, and immigration status.
展开▼
