Post Migration Parenthood as Social Site for Learning and Negotiation
Authors:   , van Beurden Sparky Lola 
Published: June 2023

Research shows how migration has a profound impact on people’s parenting experiences and practices, as it disrupts and rearranges social contexts, cultural frames of reference and access to socioeconomic status and resources. Next to the challenges this brings forth, studies report how people’s connection to multiple places and communities simultaneously provokes new perspectives and practices. Understanding the complexities and potentials of parenting post migration is important, because as a socializing practice of future generations it is closely interrelated with the functioning and well-being of families and today’s rapidly changing societies. Post Migration Parenthood as Social Site for Learning and Negotiation aims to contribute to new understandings of parenting by investigating parenting from the experiences and perspectives of people participating in a bottom-up organised parenting support programme post migration. Drawing upon a community-based parenting programme evaluation study with fifteen groups of Moroccan-Dutch mothers and fathers in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, this dissertation explores how people experience, perceive and practice parenting post migration, which social processes underly their experiences, perspectives and practices in relation to the social contexts in which they engage and how we can answer these questions in the context of a bottom-up parenting programme evaluation study.
By drawing upon multiple perspectives and methodologies – ranging from sociocultural learning theory, migration studies and critical parenthood and citizenship studies to pre- and post-programme structured interviews, in-depth social network interviews and micro-ethnographies - this dissertation offers unique insights. The analyses illustrate respectively how the programme studied provided a social space in which parents used themselves as resources to learn collectively about parenting; how they navigated and negotiated multiple cultural frameworks as part of their post migration context to re-interpret meanings of parenting practices; how they experienced and negotiated parenting, parenthood and citizenship as Muslim minority parents in a context of increasing socio-political tensions; and, at last, how the study showed itself as a provocative and creative social site in which collaboration between participants and researchers was established, de-established and re-established continuously.
Taken together, Post Migration Parenthood as Social Site for Learning and Negotiation highlights how exploring bottom-up organised parenting support initiatives as a social context in which people engage post migration, can contribute to understandings of social processes underlying cultural contact and change in the family domain from a non-dominant position in society. Moreover, it shows how studying the outcomes and processes of such programmes can contribute to our knowledge on their under-examined role in the professional field of parenting support, as well as that it expands and enhances our insights concerning evaluation methods of such initiatives. Concluding, it discusses how we can translate the findings to practice in service of healthy and thriving families and societies, by rethinking parents as creative learning resources for one another, practitioners as facilitators of collective exploration, community organisations as resources for refuge and partnership and research collaboration as resource for design negotiation.