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The impact of separation on children's well-being and family relations has attracted growing attention in the study of transnational families, but little is known about its continued effect on life-course transitions and pathways. Focussing on 25 returnee parents who as "parachute kids" had lived away from their families in Hong Kong, this study explores how their prior experiences of family separation affect how these parents plan for the emigration of their own children. Instrumentalism has been a common theme in the study of middle-class East Asian transnational families, but our findings reveal that emotions and cultural values, especially filial piety and family togetherness, are also integral to migration plans. Our discussion complicates the adverse impact of splitting the family transnationally, which is commonly studied at the point of separation. It unsettles the representation of East Asian transnational migration as an instrumental strategy for household accumulation. We argue that research into transnational migration benefits from a life-course perspective and more explicit attention to the emotional dimensions of migration. This is especially so when reverse migration to previous places of settlement is increasingly common among a younger generation of returnees.

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Purpose Cross-border students – children who are permanent residents of Hong Kong but live on the mainland and travel across the border to school every day – have been an important social, educational and political issue in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, current discussions regarding this issue focus mainly on the group of students whose parents are Chinese residents and seldom examine the wider contribution of social, geo-political, global-economic and policy changes to the phenomenon. These shortcomings have limited the understanding of the role of the state and the varied needs of these child migrants from diverse family backgrounds. This paper aims to address these gaps. Design/methodology/approach It proposes to bring changing border and immigration policies in Hong Kong back into the current analysis and offers a case study of border history. It revisits publications on Hong Kong’s immigration and migration policies, official statistics and government policy papers and (re)constructs the border changes that took place during the period from 1950 to 2013, which led to the rise and complexity of cross-border students. Findings This critical historical review offers two important findings: First, it reveals how the government, through its restrictive and liberalized border regulations, has constrained and produced different types of cross-border families. Second, it shows that cross-border students come from diverse family configurations, which have adopted cross-border schooling as a family strategy. Originality/value These findings underscore the importance of historical perspective, the wider context in migration studies, the centrality of the state in migrant families and a differentiated understanding of child migrants.