The migration of women engaged in transnational domestic work reveals how the uneven impacts of globalisation have intruded into the micro-world of families and households. In this age of globalisation and migration, family membership has become multisited or transnational, with members dispersed in space. The migration of workers and the separation this entails has raised challenges to notions and ideals of "being family". Unlike other workers on the move, the migration of domestic workers has some distinctive characteristics. It can be framed in terms of women moving between families and households; workers whose departure from their family of origin and insertion into their family of employment reconstitute the structure and content of family relationships in both material and imagined ways. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in the Philippines and Singapore, we explore how migrant women and their family members define and negotiate family ideals, gender identities and family relationships, given the family's transnational configuration. Our findings provide some support to the notion that individual members in transnational families resort to "relativising" in fashioning responses to their situation.

As a significant supplier of labour migrants, Southeast Asia presents itself as an important site for the study of children in transnational families who are growing up separated from at least one migrant parent and sometimes cared for by 'other mothers'. Through the often-neglected voices of left-behind children, we investigate the impact of parental migration and the resulting reconfiguration of care arrangements on the subjective well-being of migrants' children in two Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia and the Philippines. We theorise the child's position in the transnational family nexus through the framework of the 'care triangle', representing interactions between three subject groups- 'left-behind' children, non-migrant parents/other carers; and migrant parent(s). Using both quantitative (from 1010 households) and qualitative (from 32 children) data from a study of child health and migrant parents in Southeast Asia, we examine relationships within the caring spaces both of home and of transnational spaces. The interrogation of different dimensions of care reveals the importance of contact with parents (both migrant and nonmigrant) to subjective child well-being, and the diversity of experiences and intimacies among children in the two study countries.

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The findings of the 4 preceding country studies are examined here from a comparative perspective identifying some of the similarities and differences that underlie living arrangements of the elderly. More specifically, we compare the normative basis underlying living arrangements, mechanisms that help perpetuate co-residence, strains inherent to co-residence, preferences for co-residents, alternative forms of living arrangements, and views of social changes in relation to living arrangements. Overall, the focus group data on which the studies are based highlight the importance of culture in influencing the living arrangements of elderly people in Asia. The results suggest that at least for the next generation, co-residential living by elderly with children will continue to be a viable option, although the extent to which it persists is likely to vary among the 4 countries studied.