So, There's Actually Moms that can Cook?

Striving for careers of their own, and, at times, driven by financial pressure, women have
entered the labour market en masse, challenging the tenability of the traditional domestic
economic model (Shelton & John, 1996). While women who work full-time jobs have often
found themselves being saddled with the ‘second shift’ (Hochschild 1989), another outcome has
been the ‘outsourcing’ of domestic and emotional labour through the employment of foreign
domestic workers. This type of family is particularly prevalent in “global cities” (Sassen, 2000;
2002), where we see a merger of high-status (local and expatriate) and low-status (foreign
domestic helpers) individuals into single familial units. As a foreign domestic helper moves in
with a family and begins to attend to the family’s household- and childcare-related needs, the
position of the biological mother is often displaced or decentered from family life, resulting in
the creation of a new familial arrangement that has been described as ‘the care-triangle’ (Tobío &
Gorfinkiel, 2007).