Most research on migrant care work traces women’s journeys from the Global South to wealthier countries in the Global North, where they care for someone else’s children while leaving their own behind. This narrative is often explored from a one-sided perspective—focusing either on the migrant care worker or the mother-employer.

But what happens when this story unfolds within the Global South, in a context marked by a care deficit and an informal care economy? In such settings, mother-employers must rely on migrant care workers for childcare support due to insufficient public services, while migrant care workers, in turn, depend on these employers for their livelihood.

Istanbul, Turkey stands out as a significant hub for migrant care within the Global South, with migrant care workers coming from post-Soviet Turkic countries such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. This post-1990 period marks both privatization of care services and the culmination of the “intensive motherhood”  (Hays, 1996) paradigm in Turkey (Sadıkoğlu and Erdoğan Coşkun, 2024). The paradigm conceives mothers as primary caregivers expected to invest both emotionally and materially in the child. In this context, care workers become mothers’ proxies (Macdonald, 2011), and thus play a significant, and often invisible, precarious role, in middle-class families in Turkey, where working women turn to informal live-in childcare networks in the absence of efficient full day public child care. Yet, migrant care workers do not simply fill in this care gap. Together with mother-employers they step into a kin-like relationality in childcare.

As sociologists working on precarity and gender, motherhood, and migration, we explored this shared—yet unequal—relationality, shaped through emotionally charged, informal, and feminized care work within the semi-private sphere of the care-receiving household. In this blogpost, I delineate our co-authored research (Kınıkoğlu, Sadıkoğlu and Yaman, 2025), recently published in Gender, Place and Culture to highlight how this relationality is informed by but yet moves beyond a labour arrangement. It is defined by daily negotiations of emotions and boundaries, and by the persistent ways emotional labour is unevenly—but reparatively—managed by both migrant care workers and mother-employers.

To capture these processes, we focused on and carried out interviews with 8 mother-employer and migrant care worker dyads living in the same house in Istanbul at a time when post-pandemic economic crises exacerbated precarity of informal migrant work and diminished stable, affordable childcare options in Turkey. These interviews opened a window into the semi-private space of the care-receiving household, where two women of different socio-economic backgrounds end up sharing a house, gendered care work, and more importantly emotions around care work (such as jealousy, affection for the care-receiving child all of which are primarily managed by the mother-employer).

In one of the households, for instance, a mother-employer told us that she was “annoyed” and “jealous” when her toddler accidently called the migrant care worker “mom.” She even fired a previous care giver because she believed the caregiver was replacing her. This shows that the boundaries of the intimacy between the care-receiving child and the migrant care worker are primarily determined by the mother-employer. In other words, care workers are expected to perform a “detached attachment” (Nelson, 1990), where they form intimacy with the child only to the extent approved by the mother-employer. Indeed, in another household, a migrant care worker noted that she had to “pull herself together,” empathize with mother-employer, and ease her jealousy to sustain her income. While narrating the incident, the migrant care worker conceived the care receiving child as “the bread I eat, the water I drink, my life where my children meet their every need.”

This reliance and such reparative practices are not one sided. Mother-employers must manage their own emotions to sustain the informal care support they receive from migrant care workers. This reliance is so evident that one of the mother-employers we interviewed jokingly said “they could take away my husband, but not my caregiver.” Most of the interviewed mother-employers further indicated fearing losing their care workers in the absence of affordable child care. As a result, they attended to cater the emotional needs of their employees, and soothed their own jealousy. In other words, they dictate both how migrant care workers should express or suppress their emotions, while also managing their own.

The interdependent and informal nature of these emotional labour processes renders the migrant care worker like a member of the family- yet always embedded within an asymmetrical labour relationship. For example, one mother-employer described how her daughter once drew a family picture, where the parents and children were placed at the center, and the caregiver was drawn on the edge of the frame. The drawing captures the ambiguous position of the migrant care worker within the care-receiving household: essential yet peripheral, emotionally close to the extent allowed by the mother-employer.

Being placed within the family, however, is sometimes conceived as a burden by the migrant care workers. As live-in and kin-like care workers, they are expected to work non-stop unreciprocated and without enjoying the privileges of being a family member. Some of our informants noted maintaining a sense of physical distance deliberately (e.g. staying inside private bedroom) to limit interaction with employers and to protect themselves from burnout.

These emotional entanglements and kinning processes are spatio-temporally manifested. Most mother-employers we interviewed provided a private bedroom for their caregivers. However, this supposedly private space was often intruded upon. For instance, one mother-employer used the caregiver’s room as a home office, while another one allocated a bedroom for her caregiver for her to “disappear” when no longer needed. Others installed in-house camera systems to monitor the care giver, yet later removed them once a sense of trust was developed. While some caregivers welcomed being monitored as a sign of transparency, one of the caregivers – who had a camera in her bedroom- had to ask for basic personal privacy. These examples showcase the paradoxical nature of informal live-in carework (Bondi, 2008), blurring the spatio-temporal boundaries between work and non-work, public and private spheres.

To summarize, rather than analyzing emotional labour in childcare as a simple form of dominance and resistance, we tried to capture the layered, interdependent and nuanced ways in which relationships between migrant care workers and mother-employers are sustained. These relationships indicate that being “like a family member” is not really about belonging to the care-receiving family, but more about hierarchical- and yet reparative forms of managing the emotional and spatial boundaries of care work. These reparative practices are particularly significant to grasp the dynamics of migrant care work within the Global South, where childcare support is limited and informal. In this context, the emotional labour of childcare is immersed in and managed through contested kin-like and gendered employment arrangements within the semi-private sphere of the care receiving household.