Parenting strategies in the context of South-South migration

Abstract

Given the lack of studies regarding migrant parents’ views towards the education system of their host countries in an era of global movement, this article focuses on the strategies deployed by Latin American migrant parents towards their children’s schooling in the Chilean educational field. To understand these strategies in the context of south-south migration, the article is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and a decolonial critical interculturality framework (DeCI). The article concludes that three processes can be distinguished from the point of view of migrant parents regarding their schooling experience, which link to issues around accessing, adjusting and transforming. Additionally, the notion of parents as a source of knowledge emerged strongly among migrant parents as a way of transmitting their cultural capital in the context of migration.

Keywords:

• Bourdieu
• parenting
• Latin America
• migration
• strategies
• decolonial critical interculturality

Acknowledgements

This article is part of my doctoral studies, supported by CONICYT-Becas Chile Grant No. 72140612. I acknowledge the support given by schools, municipalities, and social organisations during my fieldwork; as well as the fathers and mothers, who trusted me and shared their testimonies. Finally, I want to thank Professor Carol Vincent and Dr Alice Bradbury for supervising my research and for their valuable comments, as well as Dr Jordi Collet-Sabé for reading and commenting on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As a reference, municipal schools could be compared to community schools in England. The private subsidised schools are a mix between the English equivalents of faith schools, foundation/trust schools, academies and free schools, and they are managed privately but receive state funding (like municipal schools do through the voucher system).

2 Information provided by parents during the interviews, as well as from their responses from a self-administered questionnaire.

3 Names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

4 ‘New’ is signalled through this paper by the use of single quotation marks to emphasized that even though facing the Chilean educational field is something new for migrant parents - as many other fields they experience in their migration journey - it is important to remember that migrants have experience the educational field back home in terms of their own schooling and their children, so they are not completely ‘new’ to the educational field.

5 Subject position, introduced by Vincent (2000) as a way to acknowledge other form of parent participation in education beyond the consumer and partner roles. According to the author, the citizen position highlights the complex relationship between parents and schools as a way to understand the ‘home-school relations as an example of citizen interaction with public section institutions provides’ (2002, 20).