A new United Nations report on the state of the world population focuses on women. "A Passage to Hope" reports an unprecedented number of women immigrants, 94.5 million. And all these women on the move are creating something the authors of the report call "the advent of the transitional family."
They are talking about families whose members belong to two countries and two cultures at the same time.
The most common transitional family is created when the parents leave to work in another country, giving over the care of their children to a grandmother or aunt. Some parents from the Caribbean and Ghana, for example, leave their children while they work in the United States, Canada or Great Britain.
The report talks about Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa. More of its people work outside the country than within it. It is not unusual for a Cape Verdean wife to work in Italy as a nanny while her husband does construction in the Netherlands and her sister cares for the couple's children.
In some cases, especially in Asia, a father may move the entire family to Canada or the United States, while he continues to conduct business in their homeland. The report concludes, "Leaving one's family in order to sustain it takes a huge psychological toll."