Intergenerational ties across borders: a typology of relationships of Polish migrants in the Netherlands and their ageing parents

Kasia Karpinska, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Pearl Dykstra, Erasmus University Rotterdam

The question of how intergenerational relationships are maintained when family members reside in different countries has been increasingly gaining scholarly attention. However, those studies focus mostly on the so-called “old migrant” groups. The focus on the “new migrants” from Central and Eastern Europe is still scarce. In this paper, we examine structures of transnational relationships of Polish migrants in the Netherlands and their parent living in Poland. To this goal, we performed latent class analysis using the Families of Poles in the Netherlands (FPN) study. In total, 1131 Polish migrants who entered the country after the EU enlargement in 2004 participated in the study. The data were collected between October 2014 and April 2015, among a representative sample of registered Polish migrants in the Netherlands, aged 18-59. Following earlier studies on child-parent relationships in transnational context, we combined information on given and received emotional support, given financial support and frequency of contact (face-to-face and via social media). Moreover, we complemented the analyses with the information on perceived child-parent conflict. Three types of transnational child-parent relationships were distinguished: harmonious, obligatory and detached. Multinomial analyses showed that characteristics such as gender, education and number of sibling were important predictors of the relationship assignment.