The home-based care of people with dementia in Germany increasingly relies on so-called live-in caregivers from Eastern Europe.
Their entry into the household does not only address gaps in formal care provision but also reshapes the familial structure in profound ways. Our interdisciplinary ethnographic project Triad – Eastern European Live-in Care in Dementia Home Care Triads: Informal Care Concepts, Communicative Power, and Moral Responsibility explores how familial roles, relationships, and communicative hierarchies are reconfigured when a previously external person becomes a central figure in everyday caregiving.
Findings reveal that live-in caregivers are not solely treated as workers, but are often symbolically assigned family-like roles—such as a “surrogate daughter” or a “replacement wife.” These symbolic integrations are rarely without conflict and unfold through ongoing negotiations of emotional closeness, authority, and responsibility. They involve not only the live-in caregivers and family members, but also rotating care workers and people with dementia themselves.
These relational shifts indicate that the presence of a live-in caregiver transforms more than just the mode of care—it reconfigures the entire household’s affective and social order. Hybrid constellations emerge at the intersection of kinship, paid care work, and transnational migration, challenging dominant notions of what constitutes “family,” “home,” and “good care.”
By examining how familial proximity and distance are negotiated in everyday interactions, the project sheds light on the ambivalent position of live-in caregivers—simultaneously intimate and peripheral, indispensable yet replaceable. The aim of this paper is to make visible the social and relational dynamics underlying these care arrangements and to contribute to a deeper understanding of how transnational live-in care reshapes dementia care in the private home.