When Children Move Overseas: Why Visits Are So Rare for South Africa’s Emigrant Families
More than one million South Africans, roughly 1.6% of the country’s 63 million people, currently live abroad. While emigration is often discussed in economic or political terms, its most profound consequences are deeply personal. Migration is never an isolated act. When one person leaves, an entire family system is altered, stretching relationships across continents and reshaping how love, care, and connection are expressed.
For parents left behind, the departure of an adult child marks the beginning of a long-distance relationship defined by absence, longing, and adaptation.
Parents, grandparents, siblings, and close friends must learn to maintain bonds across time zones, borders, and vastly different daily realities. While technology has made communication easier than ever, it has not erased the ache for physical presence.
Despite the geographical distance, the parent–child bond remains remarkably resilient. Many families attempt to sustain closeness through phone calls, video chats, instant messages, and social media. Yet for parents, these digital connections often feel incomplete. Seeing a child on a screen is not the same as sharing a meal, walking through their neighbourhood, or holding a grandchild for the first time.
For this reason, transnational visits carry extraordinary emotional weight. When parents are able to travel, visits become lifelines, opportunities to step into their children’s new worlds, understand their routines, and reconnect in ways that technology cannot replicate. These moments allow parents to bridge the gap between imagined lives and lived realities abroad.
Yet for most South African families separated by migration, these visits are far rarer than the longing that fuels them.
Inside the research
A recent qualitative research study explored why visits from South African parents to their emigrant children remain so infrequent. The study deliberately focused on parents travelling abroad, rather than on children returning home, centring the often-overlooked experiences of older adults navigating transnational family life.
The research involved 37 South African parents between the ages of 50 and 85, drawn from diverse racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds. All participants were fluent in English and had at least one adult child who had lived overseas for a minimum of one year. Most participants were women, reflecting broader caregiving and relational patterns within families.
Their children had emigrated primarily to Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, destinations that mirror long-standing trends in South African emigration toward English-speaking, economically developed countries.
Through in-depth interviews, the study uncovered the complex web of financial, emotional, physical, relational, and bureaucratic factors that shape whether visits happen at all, and if they do, how often.
Why visits matter
For transnational families, visits play a crucial role in sustaining emotional bonds. They deepen and complement virtual contact, allowing families to experience closeness beyond the limits of screens and schedules.
For parents, visiting their children’s homes offers something irreplaceable: context. It transforms fragmented glimpses from video calls into a fuller understanding of daily life abroad. These visits enable shared routines, quiet moments, spontaneous conversations, and non-verbal communication, the subtle cues of tone, posture, and presence that form the foundation of intimacy.
Despite their importance, the study revealed that such visits are the exception rather than the norm. Only a small number of parents were able to visit their children regularly, perhaps once a year or every few years. For most participants, visits were rare, one-off events, or had never occurred at all.
Many parents described long gaps between visits and deep uncertainty about whether another visit would ever be possible. This absence intensified feelings of loneliness and emotional displacement. Some parents spoke of feeling increasingly “out of sync” with their children’s lives, while others expressed fears of becoming peripheral or “irrelevant” in their families’ evolving stories.
The three major barriers
Although nearly all parents expressed a strong desire to visit more often, this longing was constrained by three interlinked challenges.
1. Financial constraints
Cost emerged as the most significant barrier. Long-haul flights from South Africa to destinations such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States are prohibitively expensive. The weakness of the South African rand against major currencies turns travel into a luxury many parents simply cannot afford.
For retirees living on fixed incomes, the decision to visit often involves painful trade-offs between financial security and emotional wellbeing. Even when airfare is secured, additional costs, visa fees, compulsory medical insurance, medical examinations, and accommodation expenses — quickly escalate, placing visits beyond reach.
2. Logistical and physical strain
The sheer distance between South Africa and popular emigration destinations creates immense logistical challenges. Long-haul travel is physically demanding, particularly for older adults.
Many parents in the study lived with chronic illnesses, mobility limitations, or fatigue, making extended flights daunting or medically inadvisable. Even when travel is possible, deciding how long to stay presents another dilemma: visits must be long enough to justify the effort and cost, but not so long that they disrupt routines, independence, or health.
Planning a visit, participants noted, is both practically complex and emotionally exhausting.
3. The emotional weight of goodbye
Perhaps the most profound barrier is emotional. Every visit carries an inevitable ending. For older parents, especially those uncertain about future travel, each farewell feels heavy with finality.
The joy of togetherness becomes intertwined with anticipatory grief. As the end of a visit approaches, many parents experience deep emotional distress, knowing there may be no clear timeline, or guarantee, for seeing their children again. Some participants admitted that the pain of parting outweighed the joy of visiting, leading them to avoid travel altogether.
Read also Top 10 African Countries with the Highest IMF Debt at the End of 2025
Longing for presence
For many South African parents, the reality is stark: limited financial means, declining health, or emotional exhaustion may restrict the number of visits they can make in their lifetime. While digital communication helps maintain contact, parents consistently emphasised that technology cannot replace physical presence.
What is missed are the ordinary moments, shared meals, casual conversations, playful interactions with grandchildren, and the comfort of physical closeness.
Ultimately, visits matter because they offer what no screen can fully provide: presence. In a world where families are increasingly stretched across borders, that presence has become both priceless and painfully rare.
