4.1 Research foci
An analysis of research on transnational families between 2018 and mid-2023 reveals a strong thematic focus on care and ICT-mediated communication, which have become the dominant areas of inquiry. Other topics – such as intergenerational relations, remittances, education, language, wellbeing and gender norms receive comparatively less attention, though they remain represented. This section reviews these dominant research foci, considers how they shape the conceptualisation of transnational families in this research field, and determines which dimensions of family life are treated as most analytically important in recent scholarship.
Within this thematic landscape, care has emerged as the single largest focus of research. Studies consistently demonstrate that the care family members provide to each other – an essential form of every individual’s overall (transnational) social protection, irrespective of the welfare regime they are located in – does not stop at the borders of the nation-state but extends across two or more nation-states (e.g., Palash & Baby-Collin, 2021). Such studies have thus examined how transnational caregiving is organised and sustained, how care is provided, by whom and why (e.g., Reisenauer, 2018; Shubin, 2022). Taken together, these studies offer key insights into both the opportunities and obstacles of caregiving across national borders, highlighting its embeddedness in family, gender and institutional norms, as well as immigration and welfare regimes. Typically, studies investigate the care flows from the middle generation to children as well as to the older generations, shaped by cultural expectations on how care is given and/or perceived, and disproportionally carried out by adult women (e.g., Haagsman & Mazzucato, 2021; Hsu, 2018; Serra-Mingot, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified scholarly interest in transnational care, as mobility restrictions disrupted care networks, deepened emotional and intergenerational tensions, and at once revived solidarities and reflections on global inequality (Hinkson et al., 2022; Herrera et al., 2022). In this continuously growing body of work, the care for children – and, to a lesser extent, for older parents – remains a priority concern, but relatively little research addresses caregiving for the individuals with illnesses or disabilities, or members of the middle generation such as siblings and kin-like others.
A large number of studies investigate how ICTs sustain care across distance, showing that maintaining familyhood relies heavily on digitally mediated interaction (e.g., Merla et al., 2021; Osei et al., 2023; Gordano Peile, 2018; Popyk & Pustułka, 2021; Schlobach, 2019; Share et al., 2018). Recent research demonstrates that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital communication became particularly indispensable for sustaining transnational care and family solidarity amid travel restrictions and health risks (Hinkson et al., 2022; Juozeliūnienė et al., 2021). Some studies adopt a critical stance, drawing attention to asymmetries in care roles between migrants and non-migrants (Arnold, 2021) or to the ambivalent nature of ‘elastic care work’, which intertwines fulfilment with frustration (Cabalquinto, 2020).
The above mentioned body of work connects caregiving practices to the second major focus in the reviewed literature: ICT-mediated communication within transnational families. In general, digital technologies are widely studied as central to maintaining family life at a distance, focusing on both modes and substance of such communication. Research shows how ICTs – such as messaging apps, video calls, and social media – help to preserve emotional bonds, support performing everyday family roles, and enable ritualised practices and familial displays. Moving beyond a view of ICTs as neutral tools or simple facilitators of connection, some reviewed recent work emphasises their ambivalent role: digital interactions can foster closeness but also reinforce absence, create an ‘illusion of togetherness and belonging’ while producing feelings of guilt (e.g., Kędra, 2020), generate intimacy while enabling surveillance (Zhao, 2019), and provide connectivity while simultaneously producing emotional strain (e.g., Wang & Lim, 2021). To capture the complexities of ICT-mediated communication in TNFs, scholars have introduced concepts such as ‘digital kinning’ (Baldassar & Wilding, 2020; Wilding et al., 2020; introduced in the section above) and ‘digital homing’ (Wilding et al., 2022), enabling an analysis of how families use technologies to sustain relations, (re)create belonging, and maintain transnational identities. Importantly, research also highlights the significance of silences and voids in transnational exchanges (e.g., Sampaio, 2020), strategic virtual absence to avoid conflict (e.g., Hsu, 2021), and disconnective practices to resist familial control and surveillance in transnational settings (e.g., Zhao, 2019). Despite these notable examples, the use of digital technologies as a tool of control, conflict or negotiation within transnational family relationships, remain understudied. At the same time, little attention has been given to the structural and technological conditions – such as migration regimes, legal status, or unequal internet access – that shape digital family life when engaging in transnational care.
Communication, central to studies on maintaining familyhood through digital means, is also a key concern in research on transnational families from the perspective of intergenerational solidarity. Methodologically, this strand is more balanced than those discussed above, with quantitative studies making up a substantial share (including the typology studies, among others). This body of work mainly shows how emotional, material and practical support continues to circulate between generations across borders, though varying in form, intensity, and over time. Most studies draw on the intergenerational solidarity paradigm (see Bengtson, 2001) and focus on dyads formed by adult children having migrated abroad and older parents having stayed in the country of origin (e.g., Földes & Savu, 2018; Karpinska & Dykstra, 2019).18 These dyads are usually studied from the perspective of a single member. While some research examines a single dimension of solidarity (e.g., Hărăguș et al., 2018, Popyk & Pustułka, 2021), others address several dimensions (e.g., Hărăguș & Telegdi-Csetri, 2018) or even propose typologies of intergenerational relations (e.g., Baykara-Krumme & Fokkema, 2019; Földes & Savu, 2018; Guo et al., 2018b; Karpinska & Dykstra, 2019). Recent studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted reciprocal intergenerational support (e.g., Maviza & Nzima, 2022) and reshaped digital family interactions, including identity negotiations between queer international students and their parents (e.g., Zheng, 2023). Finally, some important gaps remain: solidarity within a generation is rarely examined (with few exceptions, e.g., Budginaitė-Mačkinė & Juozeliūnienė, 2023); intergenerational ambivalence19 is addressed but not extensively (with few exceptions e.g., Gallo, 2019); and certain dimensions, such as consensual solidarity20 (e.g., Gallo, 2019) receive relatively little attention.
Wellbeing and (mental) health have started gaining more attention in recent years, particularly the well-being of underage children and their parents abroad. Studies examine the effects of geographical distance on migrant parents’ wellbeing (e.g., Butt, 2018; Lai & Fong, 2023), including undocumented parents (e.g., Galvan et al., 2022), and on the underage children who remain in the country of origin (e.g., Edelblute & Altman, 2018; Zhao et al., 2018). Other work considers children who migrate to join their parents (e.g., Ismail, 2019), children later sent back to the extended family in the country of origin (e.g., Bohr et al., 2018), and the long-term effects of parental separation in childhood on wellbeing in adulthood (e.g., Eremenko & Bennett, 2018). While children’s health and wellbeing receive increasing attention, measurement instruments do not always address children directly but rely on the assessments of the remaining parent (e.g., Edelblute & Altman, 2018). Some of the literature on intergenerational solidarity also examines its relationship with the wellbeing (e.g., Guo et al., 2018a) and health (e.g., Tezcan, 2018) of older parents who remain in the country of origin after their adult children’s migration (e.g., Guo et al., 2018a; Tezcan, 2018). Even if the importance of studying wellbeing from multiple viewpoints is increasingly recognised (e.g., Phoenix, 2019), most research still relies on data collected from a single family member. Recent studies also point to the COVID-19 pandemic as a period that exposed the vulnerabilities of transnational families, with mobility restrictions shaping wellbeing and revealing gendered differences in life satisfaction among migrants living apart from their families (e.g., Gerber & Ravazzini, 2022). Beyond parent-child relationships, some of the studies on transnational families address the health outcomes of migration for both migrants and their families (e.g., Gustafsson, 2018; Webb, 2018), the healthcare needs of relatives across borders (e.g., Lafleur & Romero, 2018), and the role of kin in chronic illness contexts (e.g., Lukman & Merry, 2023).
Another important body of research examines how gender roles and norms are reproduced, negotiated, or transformed in transnational family life. Women – particularly mothers – are most frequently studied as those who shoulder the emotional and logistical burden of maintaining family ties across borders, coordinating caregiving from afar and engaging in transnational mothering while working abroad. This emphasis reflects not only persistent gendered expectations surrounding caregiving within the studied families and communities, but also potential biases in research that foreground women’s roles. At the same time, some studies show that migration can increase women’s autonomy and decision-making power, particularly through their financial contributions to the family. By contrast, research on men’s roles in transnational families has been relatively limited. When addressed, men are often portrayed primarily as economic providers, with less attention paid to their emotional engagement or caregiving. Nevertheless, emerging research suggests that migration-related disruptions to family arrangements can prompt men remaining in the country of origin to assume roles that are considered non-traditional in their context, including caregiving (e.g., Ballaret & Lanada, 2022). A modest but growing body of research is also beginning to address transnational fatherhood (e.g., Hershberg & Lykes, 2019; Roy & Yumiseva, 2021). Overall, migration can both reinforce and reshape gender norms: it may empower women by strengthening their financial independence and authority within the household, while also creating openings for men to engage more actively in caregiving (e.g., Ballaret & Lanada, 2022). These shifts, however, are highly context-dependent – shaped by class, ethnicity, legal status, and the cultural frameworks of both origin and destination societies – and may either constitute temporary adjustments or lead to more enduring changes (e.g., Tolstokorova, 2018).
Research on remittances, education, and language also falls into the thematic scope of TNF studies, albeit to a lesser extent. Remittances are analysed not only as economic transfers but also as expressions of care and family continuity across distance (e.g., Bakuri & Amoabeng, 2023, Bruhn & Oliveira, 2022; Chikwira & Madziva, 2023; Kaur & Kaur, 2022; McCallum, 2022; Palash & Baby-Collin, 2021). The examined studies highlight how remittances sustain family support systems, securing access to education, healthcare and housing for family members who remain in the country of origin. Beyond their material function, they also serve as emotional and symbolic gestures (e.g., Zharkevich, 2019), that reinforce familial bonds and fulfil moral expectations of reciprocity. The COVID-19 pandemic also broadened the notion of remittances to include the exchange of safety norms and coping practices within transnational families living under different regimes of normality (e.g., Galstyan & Galstyan, 2021). Overall, gendered patterns are frequently emphasised, with women’s remittances more often tied to caregiving roles and social reproduction and men’s more commonly framed as financial provision (e.g., Singh, 2019). Some studies also explore the social cost of remittances, pointing to the emotional burden and precarity migrants experience, especially when these transfers become routinised or expected (e.g., Solari, 2019).
Education and language have been approached as both resources and areas of tension within transnational family life in the reviewed literature. Education is most often examined through the lens of mobility – more specifically, as a strategic decision made by migrant families to secure better future opportunities for their children. Research in this area explores parental strategies for managing educational opportunities across borders (including practices of long-distance parenting), as well as children’s educational outcomes and the ways these are shaped by the family’s transnational circumstances (e.g., Bakaari & Escandell, 2022; Cebotari et al., 2018; Demirsu, 2022). Language, often closely tied to education, is studied as both an identity marker and a medium of intergenerational cultural transmission and belonging (e.g., Alasmari, 2023; Cruz-Manjarrez & Baquadano-Lopez, 2020; Hirsch & Lee, 2018; Istanbullu, 2020; Lexander, 2021; Moustaoui Srhir, 2020). Research often explores family language policy, including parents’ language ideology, practices and tensions around language practices in transnational families (e.g., Alasmari, 2023). TNFs are shown to navigate multilingual environments, experience language loss, and also maintain their heritage language (i.e., the language spoken in the family and/or country of origin). Similarly, the studies also examine how destination country languages are used in the home setting (e.g., Huang et al., 2022). However, most of this scholarship tends to focus on parents’ and caregivers’ perspectives, with few studies examining children’s agency in shaping educational and linguistic trajectories across borders.
4.2. Less explored areas in transnational families research
Beyond identifying dominant themes, it is also important to consider less explored areas in the reviewed research strand and what they reveal about knowledge production within the field of TNF studies. As demonstrated in the previous section, our analysis of recent TNF studies indexed in major scholarly databases indicates a tendency to privilege certain practices (care), family roles (particularly mothers), and family structures (nuclear heterosexual families), while constraining engagement with intersectional and interdisciplinary analyses of how inequalities shape transnational families’ lives. In this section we highlight the less explored areas not because they are entirely absent – there are some studies addressing many of these aspects in TNF research within and beyond the corpus we analysed – but because they warrant greater attention to better capture the diversity of family structures, roles and practices.
Regarding family structures, most studies examine heterosexual, nuclear households – often reflecting Western family norms – while devoting comparatively limited attention to blended and reconstituted families, queer families, or polygamous arrangements. This emphasis yields a partial representation of transnational family life, in which Western-centric normative family models implicitly operate as a default model in TNF research. Additionally, family lives shaped by displacement, deportation or forced separation appear underrepresented within the TNF literature identified for this review, despite the significance of cross-border experiences. Greater attention to both voluntary and forced separations and reunifications across origin, transit and destination contexts would deepen the understanding of how state policies and broader structural constraints (re)shape who is recognized as family across borders.
At the same time, this pattern should not be interpreted as a lack of scholarship on these issues. A substantial body of research beyond the scope of this review examines forced migration, asylum regimes, deportability, and structurally constrained parenting practices, engaging with questions of transnational motherhood and family separation (e.g., Lijnders, 2023). However, this scholarship is typically situated within refugee and forced migration studies and does not necessarily frame these dynamics under the label of “transnational families”, instead employing alternative keywords that were not used to construct the initial corpus for this review. The relative marginality of these aspects in our findings may reflect both the limits of our keyword-based, specific databases-focused search strategy and a partial separation between research strands that address closely related empirical realities without consistently engaging in dialogue with one another.
The visibility of different voices in the reviewed TNF research is similarly uneven. While a significant share of research examines dyads involving migrant parents and underaged children remaining in the country of origin, children are often represented primarily through their parents and are less frequently interviewed directly. As a result, they are still too often portrayed as passive dependents rather than as active participants, and their agency in shaping transnational familyhoods remains less visible. Voices of siblings and extended kin networks – who are often central to sustaining care flows and emotional support across borders, particularly in arrangements involving older adults in the country of origin – are present, but rarely feature prominently in the analyses. Research focusing on transnational family members with disability, chronic illness or long-term dependency remains marginal, despite their significance for everyday family life, further contributing to a partial representation of TNFs. The uneven visibility can be partly shaped by research design and practical constraints, including ethical and logistical difficulties in interviewing children, and the challenges of multi-sited fieldwork needed to capture extended kin across locations. This underrepresentation is further heightened by challenges in accessing members of TNFs, particularly in the ‘Global South’, as research funding and resources tend to be concentrated in destination countries. The uneven visibility can also partially reflect the strong influence of transnational motherhood and care-oriented scholarship, as well as migration policies that privilege nuclear family categories, thereby reinforcing dyadic and parent–child-centred understandings of transnational family life.
Another limitation lies in the tendency to treat TNFs as static entities defined primarily by geographical separation, rather than as dynamic constellations embedded in relational and cultural contexts. This perspective risks overlooking the temporal dimension of transnational family life and the ways in which family roles and obligations, as well as relationships and intimacy, evolve over time. Longitudinal research designs are crucial for capturing these changing dynamics,21 including how separation, return and reunion transform emotional relationships, care arrangements and power relations within family units. On the one hand, practical constraints related to longitudinal, multi-sited research help explain the prevalence of cross-sectional designs that capture transnational families at a single moment. On the other hand, a predominant focus on the moment of separation and emphasis on spatial dispersion as defining features of transnationality may unintentionally underplay the possibility of reconfiguration and changes over time. A wider application of longitudinal multi-sited research coupled with a stronger focus on temporality would enable more researchers to examine not only the maintenance of transnational relationships but also on how they are (re)negotiated, strained, reconfigured, or potentially dissolved across the life course and shifting migration trajectories.
The patterns discussed above are also linked to gendered assumptions embedded in TNF research.22 Much of the reviewed literature focuses on transnational motherhood, frequently depicting migrant women – particularly from the Global South – as archetypal caregivers and primary bearers of emotional and practical responsibilities, often within a ‘care drain’ framing that implicitly problematises maternal mobility (cf. Dumitru, 2014). Migrant men are still predominantly portrayed as economic providers, with limited attention for their emotional lives and subjective experiences,23 despite growing evidence that transnational masculinities are deeply shaped by moral obligations, care responsibilities and bureaucratic constraints. This asymmetry not only relates to analytical preferences but also to broader gender norms and migration regimes that often continue to associate women with care and men with breadwinning. While some newer studies do examine men’s engagement in care duties in the countries of origin, especially fathering, the broader cultural and institutional frameworks that enable or constrain such involvement are rarely addressed in the studies included in this review. Changes in caregiving patterns are often framed as temporary adaptations to separation, rather than as potentially enduring transformations of gender relations. Beyond parenting, reviewed work also has addressed grandparenthood, typically highlighting grandmothers’ provision of childcare, but comparatively less attention is given to care provided by children, by older adults, or by and for siblings and kin-like relations. Virtually none address care in contexts of illness, disability, or long-term dependency, thereby reinforcing a narrowed understanding of care within TNFs.
The review of dominant research foci confirms a persistent imbalance between micro and macro-level analyses, already discussed in relation to the conceptualisation of transnational families in the previous section. Research has generated rich insights into how families provide care, communicate and exchange remittances across distance, yet these practices are seldom situated within the broader structural conditions that shape them, including visa regulations, migration and border regimes, and shifting geopolitical dynamics that delimit mobility and family reunification (cf. Christ & Etzold, 2022). ICT studies, for example, show how digital tools facilitate ‘digital kinning’ and ‘digital homing’, supporting emotional intimacy and everyday coordination. However, they rarely account for the uneven conditions under which such practices occur, including unequal access to digital infrastructure, restrictive migration regimes, and precarious legal statuses. Similarly, studies of remittances often focus on their symbolic and material significance for sustaining family ties, without embedding them in the political economy of global remittance flows or in the regulatory frameworks that condition their circulation. This relative neglect of structural factors risks portraying TNFs as self-contained units creatively managing distance, rather than as families embedded in global regimes of inequality and migration governance. At the same time, research that focuses exclusively on structure underplays the agency of family members, who adapt, resist, or navigate constraints. Greater use of scale-bridging approaches would help illuminate how structural forces and family agency are mutually constitutive rather than analytically separable.24
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored these dynamics in particularly stark ways. Families were caught between border closures, disrupted care chains and prolonged separations, which magnified financial, social and emotional vulnerabilities (see also Végh et al., 2025). Similarly, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, transnational family lives in contexts of forced displacement have received renewed scholarly attention, highlighting how war and geopolitical rupture reshape family configurations across borders (see also Schrooten, 2025). Yet few studies included in the review investigate how states actively construct these vulnerabilities by determining who can cross borders under ‘essential’ categories, thereby increasing inequalities between different groups of migrants and families. As recent work going beyond this review also shows, even within the same household, family members may experience unequal access to legal rights and mobility opportunities, producing divergent transnational trajectories and forms of belonging (e.g., Van Hook & Glick, 2020). These dynamics highlight the importance of examining TNFs not only as family units negotiating distance but also as subjects of governance, exposed to policy practices that render some families precarious while leaving others exempt. What is needed is a wider use of more dynamic analytical frameworks that capture the interaction between structure and agency, recognising families as both constrained by and actively shaping the socio-political landscapes they inhabit.
