Delegation of Care-Giving as a Strategy for Good Mothering: Case Study of Vietnamese Immigrant Mothers who Hire Czech Nannies

• Authors: SOURALOVÁ Adéla
• Year of publication: 2016
• Type: Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
• Description: Many scholars dealing with the issues of care, migration and motherhood call for acknowledging the breadwinning role of mothers as an integral part of “good mothering”, and not as a mark of a woman’s failure as a mother (Erel, 2009; Chamberlain, 1997; Liamputtong, 2006). This paper contributes to such scholarship by focusing on a particular case study of care arrangements of migrant families. Drawing upon the interviews with Vietnamese first generation immigrant mothers that hire Czech native nannies for their second generation Vietnamese children, I explore how mothers make sense of their mothering strategies and how they understand their care-giving roles while delegating care-giving work to another person. In the paper, I examine Vietnamese mothers’ care-giving strategies in the context of both sending and receiving country—the family social policies and general cultures of care of both countries. The analysis of interviews challenges the dichotomy of care versus work and shows that breadwinning is a means of mothers’ care-giving. While mothers care for/about their children in workplace, the Czech nannies provide these children with face-to-face care. Delegation of care is not contradictory to the practices of good mothering, on contrary, delegation of care is a condition for becoming a good mother