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Scholars sometimes conceptualize migrants and their kin as ‘transnational families' in acknowledgement that migration does not end with settlement and that migrants maintain regular contacts and exchange care across borders. Recent studies reveal that state policies and international regulations influence the maintenance of transnational family solidarity. We aim to contribute to our understanding of how families' care‐giving arrangements are situated within institutional contexts. We specify an analytical framework comprising a typology of care‐giving arrangements within transnational families, a typology of resources they require for care giving, and a specification of institutions through which those resources are in part derived. We illustrate the framework through a comparative analysis of two groups of migrants – Salvadorans in Belgium and Poles in the UK. We conclude by arguing that while institutions matter they are not the sole factor, and identify how future research might develop a more fully comprehensive situated transnationalism.

Data gathered from 21 at-home fathers living in Belgium were analyzed and compared to results from research conducted in Australia, Sweden and the USA on fathers taking primary responsibility for childcare. The dynamic process of managing the tension between assigned norms and personal identity was studied through a comparative overview of how at-home fathers come to assume the primary responsibility of childcare, the norms they are confronted with in their daily interactions and the strategies used by these fathers to (re)construct a positive self-image. The fathers' increased involvement in childcare challenged masculine self-definitions and self-presentations in normative contexts where men's predominant involvement in paid work is privileged and childcare is largely defined as feminine. In response, Belgian fathers developed strategies and discourses that drew on a multiplicity of masculinities that appear in many cases to be both transgressive and yet complicit with hegemonic definitions of masculinity.In industrialised countries, professional and family life balance has long been considered a "women only" issue (Barrère-Maurisson, 1992; Hochschild, 2003). Women's growing presence in the labour market and the challenge posed by women's movements to the traditional male breadwinner/female caretaker model has made the articulation of paid work and family more acute. Concerns about paid work/family balance are heightened by ageing populations and decreasing birth rates, both of which affect social security systems in most Organisation for Economic and Cooperation Development (OECD) countries. In the Nordic countries, where gender equality policies date

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