I Go To ’Tanties’: The Economic Significance Of Child-Shifting in Antigua, West Indies

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Abstract
Child-shifting or fosterage has elsewhere been noted to occur in the West Indies and, in different forms, throughout the world. The reallocation of dependent or minor children to a household not including a natural parent often benefits tow households, both the child-giver and the child-re ceiver, and does not occur from any lack of affection for the child. This analysis of child-shifting in Antigua, West Indies describes the custom as an adaptive strategy for household formation or an alternative householdlevel economic strategy related or parallel to “pooling” of resources. The article argues that in Antigua, households are manipulating household composition in order to manage dependency relative to resources, or “equalize” this relationship among households within the community. It is a mechanism particularly well suited to an externally-constrained economy with multiple vagaries in which migration is a long-standing and essential economic option. Futhermore, this analysis tentatively confirms and suggests the value of further testing of Wilk and Netting’s hypothesis that when a woman’s productive tasks outside the household are incompatible with a reproductive strategy requiring high fertility, then the household is more likely to be expanded to include nursemaids or surrogate mothers. In the Antiguan context, high fertility is advantageous as a mechanism for insuring resource multiplicity, i.e., a life-span economic strategy based on increasing accumulation of diverse sources and forms of income, both cash and in-kind. In addition, women can and do exploit the “economic niche” of migration, a productive activity which clearly necessitates surrogate child caretakers. Thus the West Indian tradition of child-shifting as an element of the normative pattern of household formation allows for substantial elasticity in household morphology and is essentially an economic strategy.

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