Emotional Impacts of Global Care Chains
There are many emotional impacts of global care chains on the women who migrate, their families, and the families whose children they migrate to care for. One of those impacts is the children of women who migrate often suffer emotionally. (See Table Below) In “Love and Gold,” Arlie Hochschild references a 1996 survey done by the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila and states that the children were ” … more likely to express anger, confusion, and apathy … [and] when such children were asked whether they would also migrate when they grew up, leaving their own children in the care of others, they all said no. ” (Hochschild, 38) The children feel so strongly about their mothers having to leave them behind that even at their young age they feel they would never make the same decisions their parents had to make.
While the children feel the effects of their mothers leaving them behind, their mothers feel them as well. The women have reported feeling extreme guilt and sadness about having to leave their homes and families behind. An important impact of global care chains is the redistribution of love and care. These women have no one to give their love to besides the children they are helping to raise, so they receive it — a purer version. The children these women care for receive a more patient love. One woman interviewed by Hochschild, María Gutierrez, a nanny living in California, whose children were twelve and thirteen when she left them in the Philippines said, “I tell my daughter ‘I love you’. At first it sounded fake. But after a while it became natural. And now she says it back. It’s strange, but I think I learned that it was okay to say that from being in the United States.” (Hochschild, 40-41)
The love that the children left behind experience has become a transactional love, more economic instead of nurturing whereas the love that the children being cared for in the receiving countries is a representation of the longing the migrant women have for their children and the loneliness they experience. As Hochschild states, “… the love María gives as a nanny does not suffer from the disabling effects of the American version of late capitalism.” (Hochschild, 40)
