Adoption return trips: Family tourism and the social meanings of money

Abstract

Through a focus on the planning and making of family adoption return trips, this paper explores how the social meanings of money are entangled with family-making practices and family holidays. Adoption return trips are a global phenomenon, and travel agencies offer tailored adoption return-trip packages marketed as a type of family tourism. The new trend towards conducting adoption return trips as a family when children are still young is growing and has implications for families’ finances because return trips are expensive endeavours. Still, families prioritise these trips, raising them above purely economic values so they stand out as ‘priceless’. The empirical material consists of interviews with 10 Swedish transnational adoptive families. The analyses show that family adoption return trips, despite their original features, are yet one more way of doing family holidaying. Money becomes an important contribution for understanding how family life is being done in and through parental, child and family-holiday ideals, as well as family intimacy.