Intergenerational relations: Paradoxical integration of feelings,opportunities and issues

Abstract

Through development of the concept of paradoxical integration and drawing on in-depth interviews, this article brings a critical perspective to the study of intergenerational relationships by sociologically addressing labour migration within China. China’s massive population movement, from rural areas to urban employment, is facilitated by the relocation of grandparents, who, in traversing geographic space, significantly contribute to social and economic production by reconfiguring intergenerational family relationships. The paradoxical integration approach identifies the interdependent nature of contrastive elements related to function and significance, including rural and urban, production and care, and ambivalent emotions. This approach also reveals organically generative characteristics of social phenomena in relation to contemporaneous problems and opportunities, including (re)employment, social ties and health-related issues. In addition, this approach identifies reversal in transformation of gendered elderly support, gendered power, gendered work, as well as strategies to resolve intergenerational issues. This article addresses the pervasive practice of explaining Chinese data and relationships with theories informed by North American and Western European experience. It demonstrates by method and example the means through which concepts developed in non-Western social space can reinvigorate empirical research and theory construction in the study of intergenerational relations.

Introduction

Family studies, including those on intergenerational relations in China, tend to employ Western theories to explain Chinese data (Djundeva et al., 2019). Within this framework modernization and industrialization are understood to lead to a rural–urban divide and to migrant workers’ separation from their ageing parents and children, thus creating a population of abandoned and lonely elderly persons and vulnerable children. Urbanization similarly is seen as an individualization process of disrupting intergenerational relations and disintegrating established family systems. Research on grandparents’ involvement in childcare tends to regard their role in family decision-making as marginal and childcare is understood as a private engagement. The exclusion of grandparents’ childcare from the public sphere of a national economic contribution derives from the binary public–private distinction, parallel with the masculine–feminine dichotomy, associated with a separation respectively of economic production and personal care (Vullnetari, 2023).

Global asymmetrical knowledge production and dissemination continue to dominate sociological research (Connell, 2007; Qi, 2014). The present article, on the other hand, argues that concepts developed through non-Western experiences may challenge and at the same time be integrated into mainstream social theories, and in doing so enhance their competence. By examining changing intergenerational relations within the floating population of China’s rural-to-urban labour migration a conceptual framework of paradoxical integration in intergenerational relations is developed which not only challenges Western dichotomic approaches but also offers a corrective perspective of its own.

It is shown here that intergenerational relations are not necessarily weakened through the process of modernization and industrialization. The relocation of grandparents from rural to urban areas significantly contributes, though, to a reconfiguration of intergenerational relations. On the basis of empirical research, the article debunks the dichotomic treatment of public and private, production and care. The paradoxical integration approach developed below identifies the interdependent nature of disparate and often opposed elements in relation to function and significance. This approach also reveals the organic and contrastingly generative characteristics of social phenomena in relation to the formation of problems and opportunities. In addition, it draws attention to a reversal in relation to transformed gendered elderly support, gendered power, gendered work, as well strategies in resolving intergenerational issues.

Dichotomous or non-dichotomous relations of rural and urban, individual and family, private and public

From the early 1980s China began transitioning from a planned to a market economy. Among other things this meant that large numbers of people have left agricultural work, traditionally associated with intergenerational living arrangements, and moved to urban employment. Such labour migration became possible when the government-controlled population movement, which operates through the hukou system, was relaxed to provide flexible labour supply to an expanding industrial sector (Qi, 2023, p. 53). The hukou or household registration system has since 1958 assigned to every Chinese person either agricultural (nong) or non-agricultural (feinong) status, thus dividing the population into rural or urban residents, with associated entitlements. Those with an urban hukou receive cradle-to-grave welfare benefits, while those with a rural hukou – approximately 85% of the population – receive more modest state-provided entitlements (Woodman & Guo, 2017). Thus, through the hukou a spatial divide between rural and urban is at the same time a structural social and economic division.

Relaxation of hukou control since the 1980s has permitted the movement of rural residents to urban employment, resulting in the greatest population flow within China since 1949, and possibly globally. By 2020, the population of rural migrant workers had reached 285 million (National Bureau of Statistics China [NBSC], 2021). Young people aged 25–29 employed in agriculture declined from 66% for men and 74% for women in 1982 to only 8.0% and 8.4% respectively in 2015 (NBSC, 1983, 2016). It is assumed that rural-to-urban migration, and associated urbanization and industrialization, lead persons to be disembedded from their families, disrupting kin-relations (Y. Shen, 2013; see also K. Shen et al., 2021). This is conceived in terms of a geographic separation of elderly parents from their adult children and young children from their parents. The rural–urban divide therefore translates negatively for intergenerational relationships, with left-behind elderly depicted as abandoned, vulnerable and lonely, with their health afflicted with the burden of childcare (Wu, 2022; Ye & He, 2008). These findings, though, reflect Western modernization and individualization theses rather than the complex and ever-changing situation in contemporary China.

Migration decisions and strategies are not taken by isolated individuals but by families; elderly parents and adult children negotiate their roles and employ strategies to maximize family members’ economic, social and educational opportunities. In China migration is ‘underpinned by the pre-existing values of . . . family loyalty’ (Murphy, 2002, p. 216). Rural migrant families selectively seek advantage in the economic geography produced by state policies, balancing economic production and family reproduction (Gu, 2022). Geographical separation does not necessarily entail material and instrumental abandonment and emotional detachment. Research shows that rural migrants experience upward intergenerational subjective social status (Lu, 2022). Left-behind grandparents providing care for their grandchildren in the absence of the middle generation are not worse off than other grandparents (Silverstein et al., 2022, p. 113). Migrant parents’ and left-behind children’s mutual commitments to family interests, including children’s educational achievements, constitute a family project for social mobility (Murphy, 2020). Children engage in emotional labour to reciprocate the older generations’ provision and care support, guided by a feeling rule that normalizes their indebtedness to parents’ sacrifices (Gu, 2022).

Some studies report that grandparents play a marginal role in families. Ageing parents or parents-in-law may relinquish authority in undertaking their family’s housework including childcare (Y. Shen, 2013; see also Yan, 2025). Adult children tend to take the lead in decision-making, including regarding their child’s educational and social development; while grandparents are not primary in family decision-making, they remain functionally important, acquiring status and experiencing satisfaction (Xiao, 2021). Increasingly research provides a fuller picture of grandparents’ role in families. Although grandparents view childcare as obligatory, they emotionally benefit from their contribution to family wellbeing (Qi, 2021), while conflict between grandparents and adult children regarding childrearing practices may lead to ambivalent feelings (Peng, 2024; Qi, 2018, 2021). Indeed, some grandparents avoid childcare (Lin & Mao, 2022) indicating the negotiable nature of such family ‘obligation’. Childcare is not only instrumental in supporting the employment of adult children but is also a basis of mutually satisfying grandparental relationships with their grandchildren (Goh, 2011).

Grandparental contributions to childcare are necessarily within the family, but arguably not simply private. Grandparents, particularly grandmothers, play an important role in sustaining the labour force participation of their adult daughters and daughters-in-law (Dumitru, 2014; Qi, 2021). The exclusion of grandparental childcare from consideration of national economic value generation (GDP) derives from Western binary thinking in which public–private and masculine–feminine dichotomies operate (Vullnetari, 2023, p. 453). Such care-giving is, then, conceived to not contribute to the national economy (see Nguyen et al., 2017).

Interdependency of opposites and the case of ‘floating grandparents’

A quintessentially Western logic derives from the Aristotelian notion that ‘the same attribute cannot belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect’ (Ross, 2004, p. 166). Hegel’s dialectic synthesis of thesis and antithesis challenges this dominant element of Western intellectual history, though incompletely. Similarly, Simmel’s conceptualization of opposites:

If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptual opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the ‘stranger’ presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics. (Simmel, 1950, p. 402)

Simmel’s statement has relevance to ‘floating grandparents’, treated below. Increasingly, children accompany their migrant parents to the cities of their employment. When both spouses work full-time, childcare and homecare become problems. A significant and continuously growing number of elderly, until recently overlooked in research, resolve these issues by joining the so-called floating population of China’s internal migration. Through fieldwork I identified a population of ‘floating grandparents’ (Qi, 2018), who are key to the changing pattern of China’s families and to the transformation of the norms underlying family life.

Simmel’s conjoining of spatial ‘wandering’ and becoming a ‘stranger’ serves as a suitable metaphor for the spatial relocation of family members, who paradoxically become strangers, not to their family members of course but to the social relations within the family that operated prior to their travelling from their place of origin to the new location where their adult children work. These grandparents leave their villages or hometowns in order to join their adult children in distant locations: strangers to a new place and to the new configuration of intergenerational relations of migrant families.

Simmel (1950, p. 402) continues his statement concerning the embodiment, in the stranger, of the conceptual opposition between ‘wandering’ and ‘fixation’:

This phenomenon [of the ‘stranger’] . . . reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other of human relations. . . . The ‘stranger’ . . . is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imparts qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.

Simmel here refers to the ‘stranger’ as a social type, not to the elderly parents of migrant workers. But his notion of opposites echoes a characteristically Chinese understanding in which opposites are not necessarily contradictory, that opposites may bear a relationship through which one element of a pair is required for the meaning or purpose of the other element, that one thing contemporaneously becomes something else, and that a thing provides access to its opposite (see Qi, 2014, ch. 7).

The concept of paradoxical integration in relation to intergenerational relations developed below contributes to the literature by going beyond the Hegelian dialect and Simmel’s notion of opposites. Paradoxical integration indicates not a resolution of or solution to any given paradox, but the non-contradictory or non-destructive correspondence of opposites in a thing or event at a given moment. These paradoxes are never finally resolved but continually reproduced in the unending flux of social process (Qi, 2014).

Methods

Semi-structured in-depth interviews revealed the complex motives and behaviour of floating grandparents, by reporting dynamic situations in which their adult children and they interacted. Indeed, qualitative methods are particularly successful in identifying the details of family change and especially its underlying processes. This is because these processes are embedded in the actual life situations of individuals – grandparent, parent and child – and in their lived experiences in relating to each other. Accounts of these experiences are most readily accessed in an interview, through which a researcher explores issues or topics in a focused manner, probing where necessary, by which respondents are able to report the detail of their attitudes, feelings and practices regarding relevant events and their connections with others.

The present article draws on 105 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted from 2015 to 2019 in Beijing, Changshu, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Hefei and Shenzhen, cities in which there is a continuing influx of migrant workers and their families. In Shenzhen, Dongguan and similar cities the migrant population is significantly larger than the settled population. For instance, of workers in a company in Dongguan who were interviewed 112 out of 151 employees were migrants, of whom 16% (7 blue-collar workers and 11 white-collar) had aged parents who had relocated to help with childcare. The growth in the number of floating grandparents who provide childcare is sufficiently large that its presence precipitates new civic needs, some satisfied and others unfulfilled. This mix highlights something of the social conditions in general in China today. These matters will be discussed further below.

Interviews were conducted with two distinct age-groups from villages and small towns, including 35 adult migrant employees (15 women and 20 men) and 70 elderly respondents (44 women and 26 men). Elderly respondents’ ages range from 50 to 80 years, with women older than 50 years and men over 60. Data based on these distinct age-groups allow conceptualization of concerns that are interactively negotiated by the parties involved, each with their own agency and concerns. Migrant workers interviewed include individuals in blue-collar employment (19) and white-collar employment (16). This distinction corresponds to a person’s access to different forms and amounts of resources as well as manifesting distinct orientations and adoption of different social strategies. Gender-related issues are informed by representation of men and women in the interview sample. Respondents were recruited through informants and snowballing. Ethical clearance was obtained and interviewees gave informed consent. The duration of interviews averaged one and a half hours, although some lasted as long as three and a half hours. Respondents’ names reported below are pseudonyms.

Transcripts were read and coded by theme, including village or town of origin, reasons for relocation, relocation strategy, childcare strategy, whether domestic help was engaged or not, health status, health insurance, employment before and after relocation, income, social ties, elderly care plan and strategy, negotiating practices, feelings, conflict patterns, conflict-resolving strategies, sense of obligation and other thematic influences. Analysis was designed to incorporate concepts taken from the literature, including individualization, migration, modernization, care, emotion, social networks and economy. In this way, data analysis permits the development of theoretical frameworks. To avoid essentialization, the research findings are substantiated against the theoretical framework of paradoxical integration stated above.

Paradoxical interdependency of rural and urban, individual and family, and generational ambivalent emotions

The distinction between rural and urban space is fundamental for understanding the recent history of China and the dynamics of its economic and social development. The terms ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ require each other for their social structural distinctions and functions. A feature of China’s development model has been a population control mechanism that effectively separates rural and urban spaces and those who occupy them. This distinction and its political management have historically facilitated the transfer of economic surpluses from rural agricultural production to establish and then enhance urban industrial production. It has, incidentally, prevented the movement of under-employed rural workers to urban slums, as occurs in the majority of developing societies.

While people are now free to search for employment away from their registered home, their hukou provides location-based entitlements to welfare, healthcare and access to education that are valid only in their place of origin, not in their destination. The spatial distinction between rural and urban, through the mediating influence of hukou, generates a very particular configuration of paradoxical interdependency. The constraints on entitlements experienced by migrant workers reflect another aspect of paradoxical interdependency, in this instance mediated by another social institution, the intergenerational family. In simple terms, unmarried rural-to-urban migrant workers remit their earnings to their parents, who remain in rural villages and small towns; married migrant workers, on the other hand, are supported by aged parents who may themselves relocate to assist their adult children and grandchildren.

The spatial relocation of villagers, which occurs on a massive scale in present-day China through internal labour migration, is itself contrary to what it means to be a Chinese villager. This is clear in the discussion by China’s leading sociologist, Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), of the overlap of village and kinship: ‘Villagers [traditionally] restrict the scope of their daily activities, they do not travel far’ (Fei, 1992, p. 41). Fei (1992, p. 63) goes on to say that on this basis ‘kinship’ is coterminous with ‘spatial relationships’ as in rural society kinship and spatial relationships are subject to the ‘same pattern of organization’. This is because ‘where the population is static, lineage groups actually imply a geographical location’ and thus ‘native place’ is inherited in the same manner as ‘a family name . . . [or] blood relationship . . . [so that] native place is only the projection of consanguinity into space’ (Fei, 1992, p. 123).

The motives and consequences of grandparents’ movements through geographic space reconfigure social relations. These are best described as ‘floating grandparents’ rather than ‘migrants’. Grandparents revealed in interviews an intention to return to their hometowns after their grandchildren reached school age. Respondents indicated different relocation and childcare strategies. The arrangements may be complex, possibly involving more than one childcare responsibility, which in turn may have a number of variant forms. Some relocated to provide childcare and homecare for many years. Others relocated to join one adult child’s family, providing childcare for a few years, and then move to another city to help another adult child with childcare. Some may move back and forth to provide childcare for a portion of the year in the city and then take the grandchild back to the countryside for a period. A grandparent couple from small towns, and therefore typically with pensions, generally relocate together. Grandparents from the countryside with blue-collar migrant adult children may both relocate, with the grandmother responsible for household chores and childcare while the grandfather finds employment in their destination location. In other cases, though, the grandfather may continue farming or working while the grandmother relocates to provide childcare. Other deployments include the grandfather working for part of the year and joining his wife for another part, or the grandmother moving back and forth, taking the child with her (see Qi, 2018).

The preparedness of these grandparents to relocate in joining their adult children and grandchildren is indeed a new beginning: it requires and generates familial and intergenerational relationships that are in many ways novel, indeed contrary to those that previously operated. The reconfiguration of familial and intergenerational relations indicates not rural and urban division, not family separation as claimed in some studies (Wu, 2022: Ye & He, 2008), but rather the interdependency of rural and urban as well as the individual and the family through ageing parents’ joining their migrant adult children and their families.

Though grandparents are prepared to leave their familiar rural environment to settle in a strange city, such a decision is made with ambivalent feelings. Many grandparents from the countryside reported they had to leave agricultural work or local employment. As Liu (aged 66, male) said, ‘We had no other way but to close our shop in laojia (home village) so that we could come here to look after our grandchildren.’ Cheng (aged 55, female) gave up raising silkworms in the countryside, which provided her with more than ¥4000 each year, sufficient to support her simple lifestyle. She remarked:

If I didn’t come here, my daughter-in-law couldn’t work. My son’s salary wasn’t enough to cover their expenses. They have to pay rent, electricity, food. . . . The child costs a lot.

The grandparents’ ambivalent feelings derive not only from financial loss but also uncertainty arising from loss of the familiar and challenges of disruption. Relocation entails leaving a familiar environment and a routine lifestyle and moving into an unfamiliar environment and, at an old age, engaging in new patterns of life. Most grandparents indicated that it was a struggle especially during the first several months of their relocation. They missed village or hometown activities, including conversations with neighbours and friends. Fong (aged 63, female) said, ‘We speak our dialect. At the beginning we felt like yaba (mute people) in the city as we found it difficult to understand other people and to be understood. We didn’t like the crowdedness, the bad air, and the food.’ Fang (aged 67, male) added, ‘I felt bored. When we had spare time in laojia (home village), we played cards or majiang with neighbours and friends.’

The disruption of relocation relates not only to unfamiliarity of place but significantly of self, with significant symbolic implications. Before relocating to look after her grandson, Zhen (aged 61, female) took pleasure in working in a small retail business in the countryside. She gained a sense of purpose and achievement through managing the business. The respect and value she gained from this provided her with a clear sense of identity, which she consciously valued. It took some time for her to shift her identity from the role of a publicly recognized and respected figure among her neighbours, to an indoor domestic grandmother. Identity serves not only as a self-confirming image but is also a self-presenting force, so presentation of an identity in turn leads to a social evaluation of the person involved (Qi, 2017).

The feelings which floating grandparents experienced were clearly not singular or unitary. They uniformly, though, included a sense of achievement in contributing to their adult children’s full-time employment and their grandchildren’s wellbeing. Chu (aged 68, female) said proudly:

Our grandson has become much healthier after our takeover. My daughter-in-law was very pleased, fangxin jiaogei women dai, ba jia jiaogei women (thoroughly at ease for us to look after the child and to take charge of the household). I enjoy managing the household.

Liang (aged 65, female) took great pleasure in her close relationship with her granddaughter: ‘Before my granddaughter goes to bed, she always asks me to give her a cuddle otherwise she says that she cannot sleep. Such a lovely girl!’ Du (aged 62, female) took pride in reporting her grandson’s remark, ‘I like the food grandma makes. The food bought outside isn’t healthy.’

Indeed, respondents reported that being with small children kept them physically active and in another sense was good for their wellbeing; many reported that they even forgot how demanding childcare could be. First-hand experience of the constant change and development in their grandchildren provides grandparents with a sense of meaning as the grandchild is not only an extension of their life but also realized through their caring role in making such a difference. It can be seen that such feelings express the existential significance grandparents might experience. Nevertheless, grandparents experience ambivalent emotions which are not necessarily emergent all at once but, as Burkitt (2018) suggests, arise, evolve and transform in stages, with varying constituent elements and changing dominant feelings. Paradoxical integration explicates not only the complexity and flow of grandparents’ ambivalent feelings but also the different orientations and sequencing of their complex feelings (Qi, 2024).

Organic generation of problems and opportunities

Grandparents’ relocation resolves the problem of childcare but at the same time creates problems of intergenerational relations. Challenges arise out of limited space, differences in lifestyle and different attitudes and behaviour of grandparents, adult children and grandchildren. It is not unusual for grandparents to share a very small room and the young couple and a child to share another small room, or for a grandparent to share a small room with a grandchild, and a couple to share a small room, possibly with another child. Bai (aged 71, male) said:

We old people have different habits from those of young people. We go to bed early and get up early but my son and daughter-in-law are night cats, go to bed at midnight and get up late. We’ve been frugal all our lives as nashihou tiaojian buhao (as the economic conditions were not good). Playing meant going out to play with friends. The young people nowadays don’t have a sense of frugality and spend money freehandedly.

Hao (aged 69, female) added:

We old people don’t have good teeth, we like well-cooked food, easy to chew; but young people like less-cooked, crispy or chewy food. We’re content with a simple life but young people follow new trends. I said to my granddaughter, ‘Your dad’s elder brother had only one toy which cost ¥0.07 which he passed on to your dad, and then gave it to somebody else.’ My daughter-in-law likes shopping and has bought heaps of toys for the girl.

Lin (aged 58, female) commented, ‘Young people are not good at domestic chores, buhui guorizi (not good at managing living expenses). We have different views of consumption.’

Interviews with grandparents and adult children indicate that differences recognized and conflicts generated through living together encourage them to reflexively reflect on their own attitude and behaviour, recognizing the impossibility of always insisting on one’s own way of doing things (Jackson, 2010). Grandparents and adult children both learn to negotiate with each other and typically reach a compromise so that a workable solution benefits the whole family. For instance, Yanyan (aged 32, female) said, ‘My mother has stopped complaining about my husband’s playing games on his mobile as she came to accept that it was his way of releasing work pressure.’ Lin (aged 57, female), Yanyan’s mother, remarked that her daughter has made an effort to learn to cook so that she could have a break. The paradoxical integration approach alerts us to how intergenerational relations are organically generative, with both adult children and grandparents adjusting to each other while also unwittingly undergoing transformational self-change.

As indicated earlier, relocation leads to grandparents’ removal from their familiar location and social relations to newly inhabit an unfamiliar space and social environment. Rather than being constrained by structural drawbacks, though, grandparent respondents tended to develop strategies allowing them to reconnect with their old neighbours and friends in their hometowns through the use of new technologies. Grandparents indicated that although they could not see their old neighbours and friends face-to-face, they gradually accepted the reality of their situation and connected with them through WeChat. A number of grandparents indicated that they learned to do video chats with the help of their adult children or their grandchildren. Indeed, the disruption of relocation paradoxically generates incentives for grandparents to learn how to use new technologies. Through digital ‘kinning’ and digital ‘homing’ grandparents managed to connect and reconnect with their old ties (Stevens et al., 2024; see also Stevens et al., 2025).

Grandparent respondents became aware that interactions with familiar hometown circles provided them with some support, even if not always sufficient to help in dealing with an unfamiliar environment. They quickly found that they were not alone as there were many other floating grandparents who had come from different provinces to provide childcare and domestic labour to their adult children. Through contact with other grandparents in the neighbourhood, at a childcare centre or local school where they dropped off and picked up their grandchildren, newly relocated grandparents frequently made new friends and social networks. Ruan (aged 55, female) said, ‘I felt much better after talking to Zhang Dajie [sister Zhang, a familiar form of address for an older, non-kin female] every time after I quarrelled with my daughter. Zhang Dajie persuaded me to look at things from another point of view, from the young person’s perspective.’ Shen (aged 61, male) remarked, ‘I don’t feel bored anymore. We play cards in our spare time.’ A number of grandmothers found pleasure in joining a plaza dancing group, thus keeping fit as well as making friends. Indeed, the challenges of a new environment generate an urgent need for grandparents to identify, create and utilize opportunities to establish new connections in making a new home (Qi, 2022).

As mentioned earlier, grandparents typically surrendered their employment in their hometown to relocate to the city in providing childcare for their adult children. They reported that while they did not expect to find employment at their age in the city, opportunities for employment sometimes arose. Some were engaged in part-time or casual work and some were in full-time employment. Much of the existing literature indicates that grandparents are forced to retire early or reduce their participation in paid work in order to provide childcare (Du et al., 2019). In support of the paradoxical integration approach, a sacrifice of employment for childcare may produce an unexpected opportunity of re-employment – a loss of employment resulting from circumstances that generate opportunities for new employment.

There is much variation in these situations in which grandparents obtained paid employment after relocation, even though their purpose of relocation was childcare. One possibility is that in relocating as a couple the grandfather works while the grandmother is responsible for childcare, or vice versa. For example, Chen (aged 60, male) gave up his engagement in subsistence farming and his small spare-time rural business which together brought him ¥10,000–20,000 per annum. His wife Cui (aged 58) raised chickens, ducks and pigs, which brought an additional ¥10,000 per annum. In order to support their son and daughter-in-law they relocated from their village in Hebei to the city of Dongguan 1900 km away or 9 hours by train. After more than a year, the second grandchild was big enough for Cui to take care of the child on her own. At this time Chen found work in a factory which brought him ¥3000 per month, enough to support himself and Cui and save toward their future.

Another variation is that a grandparent combines work and childcare. For example, Qiu (aged 56) worked as a cleaner for three hours a day and spent the remaining time dropping off and picking up her grandchild at childcare, and doing housework. A third variation is that a grandparent alternates between work and childcare. Tang (aged 54) relocated to provide childcare for her daughter’s family by alternating between childcare and paid employment. After her granddaughter was enrolled in a childcare centre she took paid work as a cleaner, contributing to the family income. When her daughter had a second child, a son, Tang left her job to resume childcare. After her grandson began attending a childcare centre Tang then returned to work as a cleaner. Bo (aged 64) capitalized on the task of caring for her own grandchild by concurrently providing paid childcare for another young couple. It can be seen that grandparents do not only contribute to the national economy through provision of childcare for their adult children, permitting them to engage in paid employment, but they themselves may engage in paid employment.

With the relocation of grandparents, childcare issues are resolved but may lead to other issues. Health insurance is a major concern for floating grandparents. Respondents reported that they may receive reimbursements through health insurance from 60 to 85% of medical costs incurred through hospitalization in their hometowns. Medically prescribed medications are reclaimable but many expensive medications are not. Respondents from villages reported that any expenses outside hospitalization were not reimbursed. Out-of-pocket expenditures associated with catastrophic healthcare may be too high for the rural poor to afford. There was a general concern among my aged interviewees that if they were to have a major operation or suffer a serious illness, they might not be able to afford treatment. Ling (aged 63, female) sighed, ‘When we become ill and have to go to the hospital, we may incur more than thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan. Of course we cannot afford such expenses. We have to go back to laojia.’

Although a majority of floating grandparents have health insurance, a significant proportion were unable to claim expenses in their city of residence because their hometown insurance was not recognized. Aged respondents indicated that if a considerable medical expense was expected, they would have to return to their local area to access health insurance. The risk of ill-health involves not only being excluded from healthcare in the city should they become ill but also disruption of childcare and other household support they provide should they return to their hukou residence where they could access medical support to which they are entitled. Any outstanding medical costs incurred by rural aged, interviews revealed, were generally paid by their adult children. Wu (aged 57, female) said, ‘I was hospitalized for two days due to high-blood pressure that cost ¥5,000, which my son paid.’ Her son was university educated and had well-paid white-collar employment. In some cases, other family members are likely to contribute if the expenses are beyond the means of an adult child. The aged respondents from small towns, rather than villages, however, typically managed to pay for their own medical expenses. While class is determined by market situation represented by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income under the conditions of the commodity or labour markets in mainstream research (Lemert, 1999), the Chinese case reported here illuminates the usefulness of an approach which acknowledges the relevance of space to class: thus, rural class, urban class and migration class.

It can be seen that the relocation of grandparents from villages and small towns to join their adult child’s family has unintended generative consequences. The paradox here is that some unintended consequences are negative outcomes of an ostensibly positive development, while others are positive outcomes of an initially disadvantaged situation. Implications may then be re-evaluated once the outcome and its reverberations are known. In the context of social rather than personal or individual consequences, such an irresolvable paradox can only be noted and understood in the larger picture of social change arising from spatial relocation and its meaning for the persons subject to it.

Reversal relating to support, gender and strategies

Traditionally, intergenerational relations in China were ascending, so that adult children gave care to their parents; the relevant Confucian adage is yang er fang lao (rear children for your old age). Today, floating grandparents reverse this requirement by themselves providing service to their adult children and grandchildren. This pattern has a further dimension: traditionally, adult children practised another Confucian edict, fumu zai, bu yuanyou (when parents are alive, children should not travel far afield). These elderly parents themselves travel far to satisfy their adult children’s needs. The traditional intergenerational family in China meant support from adult children for ageing parents, an arrangement most suited to agrarian societies in which family farming sustained all members of the family, including those too old to work (Barbalet, 2025).

China’s economy today, on the other hand, is based on labour market employment. In these circumstances the elderly receive support only if their adult children are employed, with such employment often only possible if childcare and homecare are provided by grandparents. While adult children traditionally had a sense of obligation toward their parents, elderly parents today have a sense of obligation toward their adult children, especially domestic support. Family obligation traditionally flowed upward, from the younger to the older and women to men. Many grandmothers interviewed, though, had left their homes and sometimes their husbands to provide childcare for their adult children. Aged parents reported directing their resources to adult children and grandchildren, a significant break with tradition. Deng (aged 72, male) has a monthly pension of nearly ¥3000 and Du (aged 69, female) of just over ¥1000. Deng said:

Every month I contribute ¥1000 and our son also ¥1000 for food. There is no point saving this money for the future. When we die our money will be theirs anyway. Isn’t it better to use the money for them now rather than in the future? My son and daughter-in-law spend a lot on their child’s extra-curricular activities. My grandson is four and a half, taking tuition in piano, drawing, and English.

This element of renegotiated family obligation moves in a downward direction, aptly described by Yan (2021; see also Yan, 2025) as ‘descending familism’.

Traditionally, Chinese sons receive more from parents than daughters, including inheritance of family property (Barbalet, 2025). Daughters were denied a share of property through inheritance and instead received a small share of family property in the form of a dowry bestowed during a parent’s lifetime, rather than as a legacy (Harrell & Dickey, 1985). Thus, responsibility for supporting aged parents traditionally fell on sons. After marriage, a daughter is traditionally obliged to support her in-laws, rather than her own parents, as she has become a member of her husband’s family (Barbalet, 2025). Parents, especially rural parents, therefore tend to invest much more in sons during childhood, to increase his capability to provide future parental support (Greenhalgh, 1985). With parental provision of educational support for both sons and daughters a shift in gendered filial obligations occurs, putting the implicit contract between generations on a new basis (Obendiek, 2016, p. 75).

Daughters are reported to play an increasingly important role in providing support for their elderly parents. A number of grandparents from both villages and small towns indicated that their daughters supported them in various ways, including giving money, and emotional as well as instrumental support. Song (aged 58, female) said, ‘When I went back to the village, my daughter bought clothes or shoes. Last year she gave me ¥400, this year ¥1000.’ My fieldwork findings reveal that adult daughters not only from small towns but also the countryside are able to determine which set of grandparents will provide childcare. Some respondents indicated that they chose their own mother to provide childcare rather than their mother-in-law as they felt more at ease with their own mother.

The downward direction of grandparental support for adult children does not necessarily sustain the idea depicted in some of the literature that grandparents generally lack power in decision-making and lose their voice in family matters (see Xiao, 2021). A majority of the rural grandmothers interviewed reported that they respected their daughters-in-law’s and daughters’ views relating to the grandchild’s academic development. Guan’s (aged 56, female) remarks are shared by many grandmothers from the countryside: ‘I don’t have much education. Young people are better educated than me.’ Wei (aged 69, male) said, ‘I approve of the way my daughter-in-law and son educate the child, neither smacking nor scolding. Unlike us we would smack our children if they didn’t listen.’ These grandparents take a strategically weak position not because they are timid or afraid of their adult children or children-in-law but because they understand such a position will benefit their grandchildren’s academic advancement.

A number of grandparents confided that when differences or conflicts arose regarding family issues they tended not to say anything in front of their son-in-law or daughter-in-law but would talk to their daughter or son in private. Peng (aged 54, female), from a village in Anhui, said: ‘If I don’t approve of my son, I will tell him off but wouldn’t do so to my daughter-in-law. If my son and daughter-in-law have arguments, I would tell my son off but not my daughter-in-law.’ Grandparents believed that an open challenge or confrontation would not resolve a difficult situation but would make matters worse. Some grandparents indicated that they realized that quarrelling or nagging were not effective and possibly counter-productive. Zhu (aged 63, female) said, ‘I don’t like my daughter’s way of wasting money. I quarrelled with her a lot at the beginning but found it didn’t work. I then began rescuing things she threw away that were still useful. For instance, my neighbour, a grandmother, likes using the handbag which I rescued.’ In order to achieve a purpose, one may apparently move away from one’s goal, in overcoming opposition one may be strategically compliant; in neither case is the goal forsaken or ultimate strength absent. Rather than being weak or subordinate, grandparents are strategically non-confrontational in order to effectively resolve issues and achieve their purposes.

Indeed, rather than being passive, grandparents not only develop careful strategies to resolve family issues but also capitalize on opportunities to improve themselves. Wang (aged 71, male) said, ‘One day my granddaughter refused my taking her to kindergarten. She learned in the kindergarten that everyone should care for the environment. She didn’t like my spitting in public.’ Similarly, Jiang (aged 72, female) indicated that her grandson told her off when she threw a plastic bag in the street. The literature is focused on the attention and resources families devote to children. It should not be forgotten, though, that intergenerational learning is never unidirectional: grandchildren do have agency and influence, and grandparents and parents may notice.

Grandparental provision of childcare impacts gender relations of floating grandparents. Gender norms influence social expectations and cultural beliefs, including the type of tasks socially held to be appropriate for men and women. A gendered division of labour is indicated in idiomatic sayings, such as nan zhuwai, nü zhunei (men in charge of outside affairs, women of inside matters). Gender-role stereotypes and gender identification, of course, are socially constructed (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). In China a man who performs domestic chores is likely to be seen to lack manhood and therefore lose face. Women’s work is conventionally associated with care, including intimate care of others’ bodies (Shilling, 2003). In providing childcare, floating grandfathers may take roles traditionally reserved for women. Unlike the Muslim grandfathers who relocated from Bulgaria to Spain, who reported experiencing shame concerning their role reversal (Deneva, 2012), respondents in my study expressed a sense of achievement about their ability to care for a grandchild and contribute to the wellbeing of their adult children.

While there is a gendered division of labour in the childcare provided by grandparents, it has to be acknowledged that it occurs in a domain of family life in which there was previously no male involvement. Deng is responsible for hanging out and bringing in washing, and daily shopping, while his wife, Du, does the cooking. It may be argued that this is an instance of redoing gender, even though the traditional province is preserved of outdoor tasks for men and indoor tasks for women. However, redoing and undoing gender should not be treated as mutually exclusive. Deng said, ‘We try our best to reduce our children’s burden by looking after our grandchild and doing household chores. Young people don’t have time. They go to work during the weekdays and take my grandson to various extra-curricular classes on weekends.’

The case presented here suggests that older people have the capacity to ‘undo gender’ or ‘transform gender’ rather than religiously adhere to gender roles traditionally ascribed to men and women, well-captured in Butler’s (2004, p. 1) idea of ‘unsettling restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life’. Floating grandparents effectively and strategically reconfigure themselves in order to maximize benefits for their families. These aged women and men are not constrained by stereotyped gender ideals but utilize and create new norms through what are often self-conscious efforts of undoing gender. It can be seen that redoing gender and undoing gender are not necessarily mutually exclusive but coexist dynamically in paradoxical integration.

Discussion and conclusion

Studies of intergenerational relations continue to be dominated by theories informed by North American and Western European experience. Through theoretical development of paradoxical integration in intergenerational relations in China, this article provides a critical perspective on the study of intergenerational relationships and internal labour migration. Paradoxical integration refers to the coexistence of contrasting, even opposed, tendencies or elements originating from a common source. The paradoxical integration approach reveals generative characteristics of contrastive social phenomena in which problems and opportunities occur together. This approach additionally explains reversal in relation to transformed gendered elderly support, gendered power, gendered work, as well strategies in resolving intergenerational tensions.

There is a consensus in some of the literature that the spatial divide of rural and urban and the separation of family members through market employment lead to a loosening of intergenerational ties. The present article shows that the significant movement of labour in present-day China, from rural areas to urban employment, is associated with a movement of grandparents – floating grandparents, who traverse geographic space and, in doing so, significantly contribute to a reconfiguration of intergenerational relations. The preparedness of these grandparents to relocate in joining their adult children and grandchildren is indeed a new beginning: it requires and generates familial and intergenerational relationships that are in many ways novel, indeed contrary to those that operated previously. The paradoxical integration approach highlights not rural and urban division, not family separation, but rather the interdependency of rural and urban as well as the individual and the family. The reciprocal relations between floating grandparents and their adult children contribute to the viability of Chinese families today and support the contribution of working families to the growing industrial economy of modern China. Grandparents’ childcare is a form of reproductive labour that enables the labour force participation of their adult children and contributes to social reproduction. In this way, the paradoxical integration approach challenges the dichotomies of public and private, of paid work and unpaid care.

Grandparents’ relocation involves feelings of loss and uncertainty but also satisfaction, even joy, through their relationship with grandchildren and a sense of achievement in contributing to their adult children’s careers and their grandchildren’s wellbeing. The feelings experienced by floating grandparents are diverse and may even appear to be disjunctive. These feelings are not only outcomes of actions but also serve as a driving and transformative force of existential significance for grandparents. The paradoxical integration approach not only captures the complexity and flow of grandparents’ ambivalent feelings but also their different orientations and consequences.

The relocation of grandparents from villages and small towns to join their adult child’s family has unintended consequences. While adult children may be appreciative of their parents’ sacrifice and contributions, three generations living under the same roof inevitably gives rise to intergenerational differences with some likelihood of corresponding conflict. This too is readily captured by the approach adopted here, in which social space contains, indeed encourages, supportive relations which inevitably generate difference which is potentially conflictual. Here, then, both adult children and grandparents generate changes in how they relate to each other, but also reflexive transformational self-change in each generation.

While grandparents’ relocation resolves the problem of childcare other issues arise, including elderly healthcare. Grandparents who relocate surrender their countryside or smalltown economic activities and are removed from their familiar social circles or networks. Paradoxically, unanticipated opportunities arise in the city. Grandparents use their agency to obtain new employment and strategically manage childcare as well as work. Indeed, disruption and challenges in a new environment paradoxically generate incentives and need for grandparents to learn how to use new technologies to reconnect with old ties and to build and develop new social networks. The paradox here is that some unintended consequences are negative outcomes of an ostensibly positive development while others are positive outcomes of an initially disadvantageous situation. Implications may then be re-evaluated once their consequences are known. In the context of social rather than personal or individual repercussions, such an irresolvable paradox can only be noted and understood in the larger picture of social change through spatial relocation and what this might mean for the persons subject to it.

Family structures have undergone tremendous change since the beginning of China’s market reforms. The paradoxical integration approach captures breaks with tradition not only in gendered elderly support but also in a power shift between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law. Rather than being marginal and passive in this process as depicted in some studies, it is shown that grandparents are key players in the transformation of the cultural basis of the Chinese family. They not only reinterpret and reshape intergenerational relations by reversing traditional expectations and behaviour but also proactively learn new things from their adult children and grandchildren and in a meaningful sense are renewed. The bidirectional flow of intergenerational influence is also captured in the paradoxical integration approach. While grandparents’ contribution to childcare is increasingly acknowledged, their role in the family continues to be depicted as voiceless in decision-making. The paradoxical approach illuminates that in order to achieve a purpose grandparents may apparently move away from their goal, in overcoming a difficulty they may appear compliant, even though the goal is not forsaken. The article shows the value of the conceptualization of ‘reversal’; this is to acknowledge that conventional or prevailing perceptions of worldly qualities can benefit from a critical perspective.

The argument above has demonstrated by method and example the means through which the concept of paradoxical integration in intergenerational relations can be responsible for a reinvigoration of empirical research and theory construction in the investigation of intergenerational relations. A major challenge in decentring knowledge is the persistence of dominant geopolitical powers operating in intellectual production (Connell, 2007; Go, 2020; Qi, 2014). Conceptual innovation and refinement invigorate theories and enhance their competence in terms of their capacity to identify, understand and explain social and cultural phenomena, relationships and characteristics. This approach goes beyond current concerns with Eurocentrism or Northern theory dominance by concretely generating alternate orientations, contributing to theory development and to a global sociology.