Parenting in exile: Narratives of evolving parenting practices in transnational contact zones

Transnational contact zones

Hermans and Kempen’s (1998) concept of transnational contact zones builds on Bakhtin’s (1981) idea of the contact zone (p. 345) and is linked to the deterritorialization of culture. They suggest a separation of culture and geography, and make place less relevant for change processes than acculturation theory suggests. People often make reference to place in everyday discourse on topics related to immigrants’ adaptation to their host communities (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017). However, Hermans and Kempen aim to contribute to our thinking of cultures as “moving and mixing” and with the notion of “global landscapes” (1998, p. 1117). The concept of transnationality was originally defined by Schiller et al. (1995) as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (p. 48). Levitt and Schiller (2004) developed the concept into “transnational social fields,” in which migrants maintain contacts in more than two nations. They call for researchers to “explain the variation in the way that migrants manage that pivot and how host country incorporation and homeland or other transnational ties mutually influence each other” (p. 1011). In the field of migration research, the concept is mostly used to describe physical movement back and forth across borders (Carling & Erdal, 2014; Phoenix & Seu, 2013). Most of the participants in the present study have made—geographically speaking—more complex moves than from A to B, but only a few currently practised a back-and-forth pattern. Applied here, the concept is understood in accordance with Levitt and Schiller’s (2004) development, and is mainly used to describe a specific phenomenon, namely that participants adopt both global and diverse local impulses to their parenting. Informants from Somalia who live in Norway may have been migrant workers in Dubai; they may have lived in Ethiopia for 4 years awaiting family reunion; they communicate daily over Skype with siblings in Canada; they watch news in Arabic on Al-Jazeera; and travel to London to visit family during the summer break. Informants from Kurdish Iraq who live in Norway and are close friends with neighbours from Palestine, may have studied in Baghdad, lived 8 years in exile in several neighbouring countries, and receive parental advice by listening to TV psychiatrists on Egyptian television. Their context for parenting in transnational contact zones can be seen as culturally complex (Hermans & Kempen, 1998, p. 1117) and I will use this concept of contact zones in the following to paint a more complex picture of time and place.

Ideological becoming

The Bakhtinian concept of ideological becoming extends our understanding of the change phenomena. Bakhtin (1981) defines ideological becoming as “the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (p. 341). According to Ball et al. (2004), Bakhtin’s use of “ideological” has fewer political connotations than the English term. It refers more to “the way of viewing the world, our system of ideas” (p. 5). In the Bakhtinian tradition, ideology unfolds in the relational, dialogic sphere, “externally, for the eye, the ear, the hand” (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, p. 8). As Cresswell (2009) emphasizes, the materiality and embodied experience of “ideology” is seen as an aspect of its external features. Bakhtin’s use of “word” does not only mean words. Along with “ideology,” the “word” also includes material and practical aspects: “these meanings and values are embodied in material things and actions” (Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, p. 7). Against this background, I include parenting practices and understandings of parenting in the Bakhtinian notion of the word. Bakhtin (1981) links the process of ideological becoming to otherness using the term “alien discourses.” Being alien makes dialogue possible (Holquist, 1981, p. 423) in general. Bakhtin (1986) links the creative processes made possible by this otherness to cultural encounters between foreign meanings: “they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures” (p. 7). In exile, the otherness is particularly apparent. In this study, many of the informants’ narratives imply that they are forced to relate to both unfamiliar parenting practices and unfamiliar statements regarding parenting. In this “zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345) occurs. The struggle, agency, and evolution of personal ideologies inherent in the concept of ideological becoming fit with the character of the experiences recounted by the parents in this study. As Morson (2004) argues, this process might never end: “Becoming becomes endless becoming” (p. 331). In this way, it is an answer to Bhatia’s (2002) call for a continuously negotiating and contesting process.

In his explication of ideological becoming, Bakhtin describes two categories of alien discourse, distinguished by how they are appropriated: authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. According to Bakhtin (1981), it is the latter kind of discourse that mainly contributes to the process of ideological becoming. “When someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up” (p. 345). The dialogic character of this process, as well as the creativity and productivity associated with it, is described like this:

Internally persuasive discourse—as opposed to one that is externally authoritative—is . . . half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words. (p. 345)

As it is described by Bakhtin, the process of ideological becoming requires some freedom to acquire internally persuasive discourses by choice and in one’s own way. According to Matusov (2007), there is an “emphasis on voluntarily assimilation of words of others” (p. 230) in Bakhtin (1981), while other Bakhtinian texts emphasize more the “dialogic and critical properties” (Matusov, 2007, p. 230) of the process. When presenting my results, I will suggest how the analysed narratives of evolvement in parenting hold features compatible with the process described by Bakhtin. In the discussion, I will look at both voluntarily assimilation and the critical aspect of the process emphasized by Matusov.

Multivoicedness

Multivoicedness is central in Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicality. Parenting in exile is performed in a situation where multiple, complex interwoven impulses run across the boundaries of many groups simultaneously. These impulses influence practices and the way people talk about them. This cultural complexity is visible in the way in which parents talked about their experiences and is compatible with Bakhtin’s (1981) description of the multiplicity on which any given word or utterance draws:

The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements and accents, weaves it in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse. (p. 276)

To describe the active process of drawing on earlier utterances and other multiple impulses in speech, Bakhtin often uses the metaphor of voices, defined by Holquist (1981) as “the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness” (p. 434). Several expressions for different simultaneous voices occurring in the same utterance are used in Bakhtin’s different texts. In the following, I will use the term multivoiced. As a consequence of the theoretical considerations above, and inspired by the way Aveling et al. (2015) have developed the concept as an analytical tool, I have chosen the concept of multivoicedness to analyse the parents’ narratives.

Narrative accounts of agentic evolution of parenting practices

The narratives of how parenting practices evolve during exile are filled with complexity, ambivalence, and multiplicity. In addition, the character of this evolution, the movement, is narrated as agentic, active work and illustrates a variety of ways in which parents talk about these processes and influential factors leading to evolution in their parenting practices. In the following, a selection of excerpts from the interviews is presented as belonging to one of two narrative variants: (a) narratives of modernization beyond place or (b) narratives of personal progression.

Narratives of modernization beyond place

In many of the narratives, there are comparisons with the variety of parenting styles experienced in the culturally complex contact zone. To illustrate such variety, I will present an analysis of excerpts from Leyla and Azad’s case. Leyla and Azad are both university educated. Their first child was born in temporary exile in a neighbouring country, so they had no experience as parents in their home country.

When Leyla describes how she shaped her mothering style in her new context after resettlement, she contrasts it to both her own mother’s style and to that of Norwegian mothers. She expresses her contentedness with the move she made and the balance she found:

Leyla positions herself as liminal in this statement. She “[is] on the road and [looks] at both societies” and has different discourses available to her. She describes a freedom to navigate, and positions herself as balancing between the dichotomies. Leyla gives one example of her move away from her mother’s ways: “Cooking. Our mother used to spend three or four hours standing over the stove every day. Every day.” In her narration of her practice as a mother, Leyla includes activities her mother did not do. She spends time every day sitting next to her younger children assisting them with their homework.

Leyla speaks here with a voice that includes assisting with homework as one of her tasks as a mother. She positions herself as an educated mother, and assisting with homework has a symbolic meaning. Earlier in the interview, when talking about her children’s homework, she says, “Education is almost sacred to us.” This voice shapes a contrast to her own mother’s mothering. Her mother had other ways of performing good mothering, belonging to another cohort and level of education, and to another time. Yet, another voice is present in Leyla’s speech concerning mothering. With this voice, she tells me about a conversation with an ethnic Norwegian colleague at work:

We were talking about breakfast, and that I prepare breakfast and lunchbox and so on. She was shocked: “But the children must prepare their breakfast themselves! Not you! [. . .]” I said: “How can I then show that I am a mother?” [. . .] Then I understood that not all mothers want to make the home into a paradise, in a way.

The other voice appears here in her spontaneous reaction, “How can I then show that I am a mother,” which displays another of Leyla’s implicit ideas about good mothering. The caretaking embedded in the act of preparing breakfast and a lunchbox is here positioned as a mandatory part of mothering. Multivoicedness can be seen in her positioning of education as sacred and her description of food preparation as a way of making the home into a kind of paradise. One voice emphasizes homework assistance and highlights the contrast with her own mother. The other emphasizes food preparation and contrasts with what she perceives as Norwegian mothering. The two voices can be seen as supporting each other (Aveling et al., 2015), and they serve as a practical example of what she refers to as “a balance,” the liminal position she gives herself in the road metaphor: “I’m in the middle of the road looking in both societies.” She claims to have insight into what she perceives as “two cultures” and contrasts her own parenting with practices from both of them. She critically assesses both practices with which she is familiar and practices that are new to her, and chooses which new mothering elements she wants to adopt. In other words, she is “selectively assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 341), which is consistent with the notion of ideological becoming.

During the interviews with Leyla and Azad, the topic of corporal punishment and alternative methods of disciplining children came up often. Still, contradictory voices are heard in their narratives. They both claimed they were brought up violently. They accounted for their own practices by comparing them to their parents’ parenting, and expressed that they had found alternatives to violence. Leyla begins to talk about Azad’s father: He was far too harsh and hit his children frequently. Azad tells me about an episode when he and his brother stayed out at night later than agreed. Their father became very angry when they came home and hit them.

In Leyla and Azad’s utterances, different contradicting voices can be heard regarding the corporal punishment of children. I can identify different living threads embedded in their utterances, as outlined by Bakhtin:

The living Utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance. (1981, p. 276)

In dialogue with an ethnic Norwegian interviewer, Leyla speaks with one voice, judging the methods of Azad’s father as far too harsh in light of what she regards as good parenting for herself and her husband today, at the present time. However, another voice emerges simultaneously, a thread weaving in from conversations that seem to have taken place among their peers on the “given object” of hitting children: “Almost all of us feel that way” refers to Azad’s comment about becoming men. These two voices speak simultaneously, but they are contradictory. Speaking as a father in the present, Azad claims that he does not agree with hitting children. This voice intersects with his assessment of his own father as loving and protecting, and with the thread from conversations among his peers and their voices of what made them men. “All of us in our age” refers to a cohort-specific perception of the way Azad and those around him were raised. This cohort might perceive the treatment of their own children differently. The perception of right and wrong in child rearing seems to be dependent on context, and, in Leyla and Azad’s case, especially on time or cohort. Later in the interview, Azad says, “Now I think hitting children is almost gone, everywhere in the world.” In many different ways, during three long interviews, Leyla and Azad positioned themselves as being detached from their parents’ practice of corporal punishment. This particular sequence shows how contradicting values might appear embedded in voices woven in as one of many dialogical threads in multivoiced speech.

The dichotomies that emerge in the parents’ narratives do not always coincide with the place-based dichotomies often displayed in majority public discourse. Leyla and Azad both contrast their own parenting practices to those of the former generation, which they position as the old ways and the parenting of the uneducated. Azad says, “My father had no education. I am educated. My father hit his children because he had no education, and didn’t know how to treat children.” Azad and Leyla draw boundaries between their own and their parents’ cohort, as well as between uneducated and educated parents. They position themselves in the educated category. The way they talk about parenting as having evolved from the practices of an uneducated cohort to those of an educated cohort suggests a narrative of modernization. Leyla and Azad’s modernization narrative makes time relevant, in contrast to the public discourse, in which boundaries are linked to nationality and culture, in an Eastern–Western dichotomy. Indeed, the categories of nationality and culture are absent in Leyla and Azad’s construction of corporal punishment.

Most of what Leyla and Azad say coincides well with Hermans and Kempen’s (1998) notion of the deterritorialization of culture. This idea provides a backdrop for the following quote from Leyla’s life mode interview in which she talked about the family’s activities the previous day. Here Leyla recounts their evening:

In a subsequent interview, I referred to this narrative and asked Leyla where she got that idea. She tells me that she has been following a television program on child rearing on an Arabic channel, which is presented by an Egyptian professor. On the topic of how to treat a stubborn child, she tells me that the show recommended humour: “You can make it funny, not be so serious. So, in this gentle way you can manage to make your children do the thing they do not like. And I learned a lot from them.”

Leyla is speaking from the position of an educated mother, drawing on new and educated sources for parental inspiration. She knows Arabic, and resources in the transnational, digital sphere are available to her. Implementing a Middle East professional’s advice in her daily parenting practice, she uses characters from a tale for children, which her children know from kindergarten. In the tale, the tiny villains Karius and Baktus (Egner, 1949) are digging holes to live in a boy’s teeth, where they store beloved, sweet food. Leyla’s example of playful mothering, which she contrasts with her own mother’s serious ways, can be seen as an individual construction of creative, cultural hybridity. She combines educated resources selected from a Middle Eastern context with practical inspiration from the children’s everyday life in Norwegian kindergarten. In her narrative, the inspiration for breaking with the previous generation’s parenting comes from diverse sources. What Leyla narrates is the creative evolution of her parenting practices, made possible by the cultural complexity in the transnational zone in which her mothering is situated.

Such narratives transcend dominant dichotomies, as their boundaries are drawn in ways other than those expected in majority discourses (Keskinen, 2011). In particular, boundaries between good and not so good parenting are drawn along the lines of modern versus outdated, between their own and their parents’ cohorts and between the uneducated and the educated. They make use of professionals, both local and distant, available in their transnational contact zone as resources as their parenting practices evolve. Their own parents and Norwegian parents are used as contrasts to their own evolving parenting. Leyla’s perception of Norwegianness is inherent in her narratives, but she does not report Norwegianness as an inspiration. Educated sources imparting parenting, independent of location, are her inspiration. The different voices embedded in both parents’ narratives at times support each other and at other times contradict each other (Aveling et al., 2015).

Narratives of personal progression

Several parents in the study spoke about observing, interpreting, and reflecting on unfamiliar practices with children as inspiration for the evolution of their own parenting. The parents had observed and interpreted practices of other parents in the local milieu in Norway, both ethnic Norwegian parents and parents from their country of origin who had immigrated earlier, and Norwegian welfare state professionals’ practices in working with children. Kindergartens and schools were frequently mentioned as arenas for observing professional practices. All the examples of this in the data are accounts of adults’ ways of treating, approaching, or having dialogue with children in ways that seemed new or unfamiliar to the informants. The narrated processes of selectively observing and interpreting practices, are followed by a laboured work of reflection and the evolution of the informants’ own practice or understanding of parenting. These new practices are described as improvement in parenting, and the narratives can thus be categorized as narratives of “personal progression.” Compared to Leyla and Azad’s narratives, these narratives coincide better with the perceived dominant majority public discourse. Making place relevant in terms of “the West versus the rest” (Hermans & Kempen, 1998, p. 1117) and “a notion of change in terms of progression” (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017, p. 58) are discursive resources often employed by the informants in these narratives when making sense of how their parenting practices have evolved after migration. Nevertheless, their stories of progression bring interesting new perspectives. The process of change is described as hard work requiring agency, and verbal advice is more or less absent from these narratives.

One of the fathers, Khalid, positions himself as having no experience from his home country as the daily primary caregiver. In our first conversation, Khalid emphasizes inspiration from other parents in the neighbourhood. In the second, a social worker’s practice with his children is his source of inspiration. Before this first excerpt, Khalid had told me about how teachers behaved with pupils in school, where he had previously worked as a mother-tongue teacher. In the beginning, his colleagues’ practices appeared new to him.

The keyword authority—which I had actually introduced—makes Khalid reflect on how parental authority can vary and on the difference he sees between the use of authority towards children back home and in Norway. Earlier in the interview, he had answered a question about what he would have done to his son back home in a specific situation: “Back home, I would have scolded him, shaken him, maybe hit him if needed.” Based on this remark and what he had said earlier about the teachers’ way of showing authority, “something totally different” might be similar to his description of what he would have done back home. He does not describe the “back home” version of authority in this excerpt, but mentions it in contrast to what he has seen in Norway, both from teachers and parents in supermarkets. He interprets the mother’s actions as showing authority.

Khalid’s description of how he applied this kind of authority to his own fathering expresses the labour this process implies. At first, he gives the short version: “That’s something I’ve learned.” Then he divides the process into two phases: observing and learning. The first phase is what took place in the supermarket where he observed authority being displayed in a firm, low voice. But applying this strategy to his own parental practice is explicitly described as a process that took time: “it does not happen in one day or two days. That happens as a process.” What Khalid is describing is agency in parenting. The supermarket description is an example of observation as active work. Khalid first notices and interprets a particular behaviour, and this is followed by the work of reflection, in this case reflection on parental authority. In addition, Khalid accommodates his own parenting practices based on this experience, which happens “as a process.” The outcome of this activity manifests as ideological becoming. This is an example of how the narrated process of evolution holds features compatible with Bakhtin’s (1981) description of the process of ideological becoming: “Internally persuasive discourse is . . . half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words” (p. 345). Bhatia and Ram (2001) ask for description of the evolution process, and I see this as an example of how ideological becoming is suitable to analyse this process.

Which voices (Aveling et al., 2015) can we hear in this account? Khalid speaks with the voice of a learner: “That’s something I’ve learned. It’s something I have seen, I have observed. So, learning it does not happen in one day or two days.” His view of himself as inexperienced in daily child care when he immigrated seems to enable him to position himself as a learner. Still, the learner’s voice is in control of which practices are seen as valuable enough to acquire, and Khalid positions himself as having agency in a learning process of his own choice. Elsewhere in the interviews, he mentions other practices that he regards as part of Norwegian parenting and consciously rejects. He is “selectively assimilating the words of others,” which is how Bakhtin (1981, p. 341) defines the process of ideological becoming. His learner’s voice speaks of doing “bad” before learning and doing “better” after. There is also a voice that articulates a notion of “there and here,” making place relevant. This voice devalues what Khalid perceives as the use of authority in his home country and makes the observed parenting practices in the supermarket a case of “Norwegian authority”: “And authority in my home country is something totally different than in Norway.” Consistent authority displayed in a low, firm voice is positioned as Norwegian, and the boundary between the different kinds of authority seems to be understood as ethnic, cultural, or national.

Place becomes relevant as a means of explaining this difference. We might ask whether the boundary could also be drawn along class lines. The authority displayed by the Norwegian mother in the supermarket is consistent with middle-class parenting, according to Stefansen (2007) and Vincent et al. (2004). Looking at it in this way, many ethnic Norwegian fathers would potentially go through a similar changing process if they took up a learner position similar to Khalid’s. The voice with which Khalid is speaking here relies on an understanding of middle-class parenting as a feature of Norwegianness. The dialogic threads (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 276) inherent in this voice might include conversations that took place during “new in Norway” teaching, as suggested by Åberg and Mäkitalo (2017) and Gulbrandsen and Østereng (2012).

Khalid appreciates the parenting practices he claims to observe daily in supermarkets. They are different from what he experienced in his home country, and he wants to manage something similar. As a learner, he “accepts the curriculum.” His concern is that it is hard to adopt this practice. There is no struggle with alien discourses in this narrative. On the other hand, the behaviour he observed in the supermarket has been selected as a practice he wants to incorporate in his own parenting, among others that he does not like. We can also assume that addressivity plays a role in how his learner’s voice speaks about the observed practice’s value. Bakhtin (1986) emphasizes the following regarding the addressee: “When speaking, I always take into account . . . his prejudices [from my viewpoint], his sympathies and antipathies” (pp. 95–96).

The parents’ narratives of personal progression often included observation of how Norwegian welfare state professionals behaved with children. This is also the case in the next excerpt from Khalid’s interviews. Since he was inexperienced in daily child care before his migration to Norway, he found himself in a special, acute situation right after his family’s arrival, when his wife unfortunately remained absent from home for a longer period of time. A social worker from Child Protection Services served as a home counsellor for the family during this time. Khalid talks about her like this:

What had an impact on me was what she did. I saw that my children fully accepted what she said. She told them, “You tidy your room like that; you make your bed like that.” They accepted it; there was no need for discussion. While I quarrelled with them. I could see that her results were more effective than mine, even though I was demanding and spoke harshly to them. I could understand that she had a kind of dialogue with them. And dialogue was what was lacking between me and my children to make them collaborate with me. But it was not easy to manage. It took me several years until I felt that now it works to just tell them like that—Now it’s 10 o’clock, now you should go to bed. After long time, I managed to change it. I changed my understanding of how to bring up children.

Khalid’s is speaking as a learner in this excerpt as well. He describes the social worker as having a “kind of dialogue” and that the children then accepted what she told them, an exchange that was unfamiliar to him. He describes his own former practice as being “demanding,” he “spoke harshly” and “dialogue was lacking.” He describes his laboured process of evolving and his fathering practice in his own way as “not easy to manage” and mentions that it took him several years to feel that his new practice was working. Khalid’s evolution as a parent is recounted as both a change in practice and a change in understanding. After an active struggle, Khalid was able to appropriate elements of unfamiliar discourses which manifested in his practice and thinking.

Khalid’s situation having a social worker in the house was special, but his account is typical of this kind of narrative in the study. The analysis shows that other parents also positioned themselves as learners. Parents talked about having selectively observed and interpreted other parents’ and welfare state professionals’ practices with children, reflected on what they had seen, and experimented with how they themselves could perform a similar practice in their own way. In this way, they widened their parenting repertoire.

In some of the interviews, one voice dominates and contrasting voices are weak. In some cases, this voice might be analysed as stuck to “imaginary homelands” (Åberg & Mäkitalo, 2017), in others as praising life in Norway in a way that seems to lack multivoicedness. Nevertheless, none of the parents insist only on this one perspective throughout the interview. Complexity is the overall dominating impression of the analysed material.