Left behind and reimagined: identity reconstruction and the social burden of children’s migration on older adults

As international migration reshapes family structures across sub-Saharan Africa, older adults left behind bear disproportionate social, emotional, and caregiving burdens that are unevenly distributed by gender and remain underexplored in migration scholarship. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with 20 older adults in Edo State, Nigeria, and on the transnational social field perspective, this study examines how the international migration of children disrupts established care networks, triggers identity renegotiation, and reshapes the social construction of aging. Three interrelated themes emerged: migration as a social determinant reshaping care, well-being, and identity; migration as a socially constructed experience; and migration as a gendered phenomenon reshaping roles, identities, and vulnerabilities. Findings suggest that migration simultaneously disrupts proximate care and generates emotional distress, while remittances paradoxically elevate older adults’ community standing, enabling active identity reconstruction beyond passive loss. Older adults constructed migration as an economic necessity, navigating a duality of pride and loss, cultural negotiation, and spiritual meaning-making, with religious and community institutions emerging as critical surrogate support systems. Identity reconstruction was real but unevenly available: participants with access to remittances, transnational contact, and supportive institutions reimagined themselves as transnational parents and community benefactors, while those without such resources, particularly widowed women living with illness, carried the burden of migration without its compensations. We conceptualize these experiences as left-behind transnational parenthood: parenthood, care, and social standing reorganized from the origin side of the transnational field.