Averting, stepping-up or shielding: school strategies and intensive minority parenting among second-generation minority Danish parents

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and life-story interviews, this article examines parenting and school strategies of the emergent second generation of minority Danish parents and how they are shaped by their generational position. Across socio-economic differences, the participating parents are highly engaged in their children’s schooling and well-being, practising an ‘intensive parenting’ widespread in the contemporary social generation and also dominant among majority Danish parents. Yet they also draw on their first-hand knowledge of being minority children in Danish schools and society to protect their children against discrimination against Muslims and negative influence from both majority and minority Danes. The article suggests that the parents thus engage in ‘intensive minority parenting’ and employ different school strategies: an ‘averting strategy’ characterised by fending off negative influences and antagonists in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods; a ‘stepping-up strategy’ characterised by performing middle-class parenthood in (upper)middle-class neighbourhoods; and a ‘shielding strategy’ characterised by carving out a safe new cultural space in ‘free schools’ with other second-generation parents. Differing from the paths of ‘segmented assimilation’, these strategies do not depend on ethnic background, but rather on the parents’ current social environment and interrelated factors of their own experiences with school, further education, their family and broader society.

KEYWORDS:

• Second-generation
• minority parents
• intensive parenting
• generations
• discrimination

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics declaration

The research follows the ethical research guidelines of Aarhus University and the Danish Code of Conduct of Research Integrity: https://ufm.dk/en/publications/2014/files-2014-1/summary-the-danish-code-of-conduct-for-research-integrity.pdf.

Notes

1 All proper names are pseudonyms.

2 ‘Non-western’ and ‘western countries’ are categories used by Statistic Denmark in their analyses of immigrants and their descendants and draw on UN’s categories of ‘more or less developed countries’. ‘Non-western countries’ include all countries, not included in the category of ‘western countries’ which consist of the EU, Andorra, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Vatican City State. Despite the fact that it includes a number of European countries, Russia, South America etc., the category of ‘non-western immigrants’ is now widely used in Danish policies and public debate denoting Muslim minorities (Knudsen and Riis 2020) or more general racialising categories.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, grant number 8018-00188B.