Caught between cultures : Child-rearing negotiations and moral dilemmas among immigrant families in Sweden

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how immigrant parents living in Sweden negotiate their cultural boundaries through their everyday parenting practices. The research focuses on families that are primarily from Pakistan, South Asia and Somalia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sweden, this research has shown that parents use many different practices to adapt, negotiate, and form relationships with their culture of origin while also forming relationships with Swedish culture. The research uses qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews, participant observation and narrative elicitation. The main research question being explored is how immigrant parents negotiate cultural expectations and child-rearing norms while raising their children in a new social, institutional, and moral environment especially in Sweden? This research indicates that immigrant families do not think of themselves in terms of binary oppositional choices. They instead consider the ongoing and context dependent negotiation of moral obligations shaped by: collectivist family obligations; religious framework; Transnational networks; and child focused individualism as practiced in Sweden. Within this context, parenting can be characterized as a form of moral labor that is emotionally charged, constrained by structure, and subject, at all times, to institutional surveillance. Concepts utilized from transnationalism, anthropology of childhood, and cultural negotiation theory’s Bourdieu’s Idea of habitus, Barth’s concepts of ethnic boundary maintenance, Carsten’s notion of relatedness, and Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain provide a platform from which to analyze these lived experiences. Finally, the thesis explores the perspectives of second-generation individuals, providing evidence to show how children have modified their cultural identities through active negotiation in the context of home, school, and community. The study adds to anthropological discussions related to migration, parenting, and ethical decision-making by treating parents’ experiences as central, rather than investigating immigrant families only through the lens of policy outcomes or institutional compliance. This research identifies integration not as a standalone conclusion; rather, it develops over time for immigrant parents and their children and is based on an individual relationship marked by emotion. Therefore, it requires responsiveness not only from immigrant families but from Swedish institutions and families as well.