Parenting strategies in the context of South-South migration

Towards a renewed understanding of barriers to immigrant parents’ involvement in education

“…While the Nordic approach to concerted cultivation arguably aligns with the social pedagogy policy tradition of curricular development (Bennett, 2005), previous studies of concerted cultivation in Anglo-Saxon countries seem to mirror types of pedagogic approaches widely associated with the readiness for school tradition. For example, Vincent and Ball’s (2007) describe how high-end London nurseries offer extra activities such as ballet and French classes or how the middle-class mothers in Reay’s (1998) study enrolled their pre-school children in extracurricular mathematics classes. The Danish and Norwegian ECEC teachers in this current study seem to, on the other hand, reject parents’ enthusiasm for such types of activities.…”

“…The current study's findings mirror what we already know from previous research – that parents from poor and working-class backgrounds tend to prefer a clear division between what happens at the parents’ workplace and in the children's educational institutions and what happens at home (Lareau, 2011). While middle-class parents, on the other hand, are often more willing to blur the lines between home and work/school/kindergarten and foster a sense of continuity between the two spheres by intentionally aligning enriching activities at home with curricular activities of their children's kindergarten/school (Stefansen and Aarseth, 2011; Vincent and Ball, 2007). The teachers in the current studies’ accounts of several immigrant parents with poor or working-class backgrounds’ reliance on what can be identified as the accomplishment of natural growth, align with Stefansen and Skogen’s (2010) findings in their study of Norwegian native-born working-class parents’ involvement in kindergarten.…”

“…Consequently, working-class parents often find it harder than middle-class parents to meet institutional expectations from the education system (Gillies, 2006; Lareau et al, 2016; Stefansen and Skogen, 2010). In contrast, by aligning their parenting style to educational standards, middle-class parents better their chances of securing an advantaged position for their children (Vincent and Ball, 2007).…”

“…Bourdieu's scholarly work has been at the forefront of a cultural turn for sociological class theory, described as a cultural class analysis, where various methodologies are utilised to investigate how class is ‘lived’, expressed and reproduced through cultural tastes and preferences (Savage et al, 2013). In this vein, the relationship between parents and children is widely identified as a critical domain for the transmittance of social class privileges, and scholars inspired by Bourdieu have identified relationships between parents’ social class positions and different logics of childrearing (Gillies, 2006; Lareau, 2011; Lareau, 2011; Stefansen and Aarseth, 2011; Vincent and Ball, 2007).…”

“…Contemporary studies on teacher–parent relations and immigrant parent involvement indicate that immigrant parents are statistically less involved in their children's schooling and report more barriers to involvement in kindergarten than native-born parents (Antony-Newman, 2019; Norheim and Moser, 2020). Existing research suggests that immigrant parents’ modes of involvement are associated with their socio-economic status (Barglowski, 2019, Joiko, 2021), time spent in the host community, and parents’ majority language abilities (Turney and Kao, 2009). A range of studies also finds that immigrant parents with foreign cultural and educational backgrounds often have a distinctive set of expectations of the education system potentially misaligning with local schoolteachers’ pedagogic approaches and learning goals (Antony-Newman, 2019).…”