‘Your Past Makes You Who You Are’: Retrospective Parenting and Relational Resilience Among Black Caribbean British Young People

Abstract

In this article, we explore how Black Caribbean parents prepare their children for the challenges ahead–including anticipated discrimination–in order to boost their opportunities in education and work and eventually their social mobility. Drawing upon family case studies with Black Caribbean families in London, this article focuses on what we have defined as retrospective parenting to mean the use of narratives about the past as resources for parenting. Retrospective parenting draws on the struggles of a cumulative past and aims to transmit a sense of relational resilience, drawing simultaneously on individual, family, and community histories. We found that retrospective parenting had restorative purposes, with parents not only aiming to make up for their missed opportunities but also being preventive and progressive, conveying aims with forward-looking implications for the future of their children.