Parental migration and the reconfiguration of care: grandparenting, authority, and relational labour in Urban China

As labour migration reshapes family life in urban China, grandparents have increasingly become central caregivers in households marked by parental absence. This study examines how migration reconfigures intergenerational care in migrant families, drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews with children, parents, grandparents, and schoolteachers in Hunchun, a border city shaped by both domestic and transnational mobility. Using extended co-residential families as a contextual reference, the analysis identifies three interrelated caregiving dynamics: (1) Grandparental responsibilities intensify over time, particularly once children enter school, transforming what might otherwise be temporary support into sustained caregiving. (2) The concentration of everyday caregiving in grandparents reshapes intergenerational authority, as decision-making becomes grounded in co-presence while migrant parents maintain symbolic legitimacy across distance. (3) Grandparents perform crucial relational labour by sustaining emotional continuity between migrant parents and children. Taken together, these findings show that intergenerational care in migrant families is not simply an extension of caregiving across space, but a dynamic process involving the redistribution of authority and ongoing relational labour through which family cohesion is actively maintained across distance. In doing so, this study advances debates on migration-affected family life by foregrounding the relational and intergenerational mechanisms through which care is organised in urban Asian contexts.