Contribution

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how newly arrived parents construct and reconstructed parenthood post-migration; of challenges and opportunities they see in regard to the upbringing and education of their children in a new host-society; how they navigate to provide the best conditions and support for their children given the resources they have access to. Based on the parents’ views, the paper further suggests how parental support might be tailored to meet the needs of newly arrived parents

The paper draws on theories and concepts from research on parenthood in the context of migration and ethnic diversity and on parental engagement in school.

Ochocka & Janzen (2008), explain that international (especially forced) migration involve reconstructing oneself as a parent under new social, cultural, political and existential conditions, a process that entails interpreting and assessing norms and practices in the new context as well as reinterpreting and reassessing notions of parenting that might have been taken more or less for granted in the home-country. What are seen as “natural” and “right” ways to act as a parent in different situations relates to (mostly implicit and taken for granted) ideas about children, family and parenthood, “parental ethno-theories“. These are formed in the cultural contexts of which the parents are part (Harkness & Super (2013). Further, the same kind of parental support may be valued equally but expressed differently in various cultural contexts. Neely & McBarber (2010) conclude from a cross-cultural study that “(s)tudies of supportive parenting based on measures developed, typically, by majority, middle-class scholars in the United States may ignore or misinterpret ethnotheories present in other cultures” (p. 606).

Parents’ engagement in their children’s education has been found in several studies to benefit children’s academic results (Wilder, 2014), especially for children with migration or ethnic minority background (Sibley & Dearing, 2014; Epstein, 2011), and improves children’s attitudes to education and sense of belonging in school (Suarez-Orozco, Onaga, de Lardemelle, 2010). Immigrated parents generally, across educational levels and national backgrounds, consistently show higher educational aspirations for their children and value education higher than native-born parents (Areepattamannil & Lee, 2014).  Even so, studies from different high GPD countries indicate that the relationship between school and parents with migration or minority is often laden with complications Schneider & Arnot, 2018 a; Antony-Newman, 2019). Research on parental engagement across countries shows that the expected and rewarded forms for parents’ involvement in school are typically modelled on the values, life-circumstances and communication-styles of a white national resident middle-class patterns parents (Antony-Newman, 2019). Parents who do not share these circumstances have been found to frequently fail to get their parental resources, support and interaction-modes recognized and validated by school staff (Schneider & Arnot 2018 a; Kim, 2009; Dahlstedt, 2009). On a societal level, due to patterns of downward mobility often associated with migration, migrant parents’ school engagement is oftentimes mitigated by school-segregation and under-resourced communities, as well as by economic scarcity, long shifts and extensive travel time (Antony-Newman, 2019). While these conditions are shared not only by many migrant parents, but also by many in-born ethnic minorities and working-class parents, linguistic obstacles, loss of social networks in connection with the migration process and lack of knowledge about the national education system and cultural norms exacerbate the effects (ibid.). For parents who arrived as refugees, the capacity to support their children’s education may in addition be adversed by pre- peri and post-migration trauma, including the consequences of state migration policies (e.g. deportability, extended asylum-processes, obstacles for family-reunification, undocumentedness (Martin et al., 2018; Wahlström Smith, 2018).

Method

The study is based on data from qualitative interviews with 11 newly arrived parents, 5 women and 6 men, who took part of a five-week study-circle organized by the municipal integration office with the aim to offer parents information about the Swedish school-system and policies that bear on parents’ responsibilities and children’s rights in the family, as well as opportunity to discuss with other parents, and thus strengthen the parents’ capacity to support their children constructively, especially in regard to school. They had resettled in Sweden between 2015 and 2018 and came from Iraq (1), Syria (7), Eritrea (1), and Afghanistan (2). The interviews were semi-structured, based on an interview-guide with open questions, and followed an active mode of interviewing, inviting the participants to reflect and elaborate further on their experiences and views (see e.g. Holstein & Gubrium, 2016). With Dari-speaking participants, interviews were carried out in Persian by researcher 1. For interviews with Arabic-speaking participants, an interpreter was involved. The group-interview was supported by an Arabic-/English-speaking assistant and carried out in mixed languages (Swedish, Arabic and English). All interviews were transcribed and translated into Swedish. The names of participants in our study are pseudonyms. The material was analyzed using a qualitative approach: Both researchers read all transcripts in order to grasp the major themes and variations within themes; in this process we both wrote analytic memos; several meetings were held where the interpretations and outcomes were compared and assessed in regard to the data and to previous research; a common coding scheme was worked out as a result and tested on the material and modified to capture the complexity of the material; the themes were described through accounts of variations and sustained by exemplary quotes from the participants.

Expected Outcomes

The findings reflect that the migration process induces reflections about what it means to be a good parent. These reflections on parenting were paralleled by reflections on the school-system. The parents’ accounts show that they struggled to balance “traditional” norms (e.g. strict parental/teacher control, emphasis on discipline and respectability) which they associated with the former home country, and liberal norms (bi-directional parent-child relationships, child-centered pedagogy, emphasis on independence and democracy) which they attributed to the new. Parents took different positions in this, talking about the normative and political context for education and upbringing as either aligned or opposed to their own parental belief-systems; as either allowing them to relate to their children in a deeper and more authentic way, or alienating the children from their parents and original culture. The parents showed a strong commitment to develop working parental strategies for the new context, but also concern about how losses of economic, social and cultural capital (e.g. downward social mobility, leaving significant parts of social networks behind, lacking adequate linguistic skills and knowledge about the education-system) adversed their capacity. In addition, the parents worried that their children (1) did not get sufficient linguistic support to keep up in the subjects, (2) met low teacher expectations, (3) lacked peers and risked bullying. These concerns reflect real and general challenges that newly arrived families from the global south and with refugee-background typically face in Sweden and other high-gpd countries, well documented through research. Recognizing parents’ engagement and the forms of support they do provide, while also realizing the impact of structural and linguistic conditions on children’s educational situation and parents’ capacity to provide productive support, is fundamental for understanding and defeating observed achievement gaps in the Swedish school-system and in tailoring parental support.