Beyond culture: duty, reciprocity, love, and anticipatory guilt as motivations for family senior care

In Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Alexa Carson draws on interviews with immigrant and non-immmigrant family caregivers in Canada to identify common rationalizations for senior care. The findings indicate that migration status and ethnocultural background do not fundamentally shape why caregivers feel they should care for senior family members. This challenges racial and ethnic stereotypes that depict certain immigrant groups as being more inherently inclined to care for elder family members — tropes that also may be used to justify a lack of state investment in care services for ethnocultural minority and immigrant seniors.

Alexa Carson has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto and is a member of the Care Economies in Context Canada team.

Citation

Carson, A. (2026). Beyond culture: duty, reciprocity, love, and anticipatory guilt as motivations for family senior care. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2026.2674038

Abstract

Many countries are facing a growing care crisis stemming from aging populations. Due to gaps in public systems, senior care remains overwhelmingly provided by family. In North America, public and scholarly discourses contend there are differences in care for seniors between immigrant and non-immigrant families, but this assumption is rarely examined through intergroup comparisons. In this article, I examine how caregivers in Canada from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds describe why they care for aging parents or family members. Drawing from 68 qualitative interviews with non-immigrant (n = 40) and immigrant and second-generation caregivers (n = 28) conducted in three languages, I identify common rationalizations for senior care centred on themes of duty, reciprocity, love, and anticipatory guilt. While immigrant and second-generation respondents more often expressed their care motivations vis-à-vis cultural identity, they explained these values in ways that converged with those of non-immigrants. However, immigrant caregivers more commonly expressed a sense of financial reciprocity due to sacrifices embedded in their parents’ migration journeys. Thus, it appears it is migration processes (more so than culture) which influence motivations for later life family care. These commonalities serve to critique collectivist tropes about immigrant family care and extend understandings of care motivations more broadly.