‘This Society Has Taken Me.’ Intensive Parenting and Fragile Belonging among Second-Generation Minority Danish Parents

Abstract

Based on life-history interviews and fieldwork among second-generation minority Danish parents from different ethnic backgrounds, this article explores changes in parenting norms and practices between first-generation and second-generation minority Danish parents. The second-generation parents generally experience that, compared to their own parents and contemporary first-generation parents, they have a more ‘open’ and ‘engaged’ relationship with their children and their schools, making them feel intimately shaped by Danish society. Contesting integration and governmentality approaches, the article takes an Eliasian figurational approach, illuminating the historical changes in and current characteristics of the relationship between state, school, children, and parents that shapes the Danish ‘state-school figuration’. It explores how these second-generation minorities’ entanglement in the interdependencies of this figuration—first as children and later as parents—makes it valuable and sensible for them to engage in the ‘intensive parenting’ applauded in Danish schools. Yet, due to these interdependencies, their intensive parenting involves both distancing themselves from and acting as cultural brokers for first-generation parents, as well as using their own insider knowledge to protect their children from negative influence, stigmatisation, and discrimination.