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Global migration has led to a growing number of adult children providing care to aging parents across national borders. Existing research has largely emphasized the enabling role of communication technologies in sustaining transnational caregiving, often highlighting their capacity to reconstruct family relationships and maintain emotional connection. However, less is known about how such technologies shape caregiving as it is actually lived and experienced. This study moves beyond optimistic accounts by examining the tensions between what technology can provide and what caregivers seek to deliver in their everyday practices.
Methods:
This qualitative study draws on 32 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with first-generation Chinese immigrants in the United States who provide care to parents in China. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin via video conferencing and analyzed using grounded theory methods, including open, axial, and selective coding. An interpretivist framework informed by critical realism guided the analysis, allowing attention to both lived experiences and the structural conditions shaping them.
Results:
Findings reveal that transnational caregiving is enacted through three interrelated dynamics. First, care operates as ongoing, technology-mediated attention, where routine activities such as calls, messaging, and online purchasing serve multiple caregiving functions simultaneously. These practices collectively form what we conceptualize as “proxy presence,” enabling caregivers to approximate involvement across distance. Second, technology use is characterized by negotiation under structural and embodied constraints, including design mismatches, aging-related limitations, and rapidly digitalizing environments. Rather than reducing caregiving burden, technology often redistributes and intensifies it. Third, caregivers actively reimagine technologies to bridge gaps between caregiving ideals and practical limitations. These imagined technologies reflect unmet care capacities, particularly in relation to embodied labor, safety, and emotional presence, highlighting the persistent incompleteness of mediated care.
Conclusion and Implications:
Transnational caregiving is not a diminished form of care but a restructured one, in which technology both enables and constrains caregiving practices. While technology facilitates connection and coordination, it also exposes enduring gaps between caregivers’ responsibilities and their ability to act. These findings suggest that technology should be understood not as a solution to distance, but as a medium through which care is continuously negotiated. Implications include the need for policy recognition of transnational caregiving, greater attention to older-adult-centered technology design, and interdisciplinary approaches to developing technologies that integrate functional and relational dimensions of care.