‘I feel sometimes I am a bad mother’: The affective dimension of immigrant mothers’ involvement in their children’s schooling

Abstract

This article identifies the complex emotional dimensions of migrant mothers’ involvement in their children’s education, building on feminist scholarship which affirms the importance of their emotional labour. We present findings from a study of Muslim Iraqi mothers with school-aged children in Australia, based on 47 interviews with 25 immigrant mothers. Drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual framework, we argue that the reserves of cultural and emotional capital required for effective participation in children’s education can be both consolidated and diminished through the process of migration. Perceived ineffective involvement comes at heavy emotional price, threatening some women’s perceptions of themselves as ‘good mothers’.

Keywords

education emotional capital ethnic minorities habitus migration mothers

This article provides an analysis of migrant mothers’ involvement in their children’s education, highlighting the emotional dimensions of the educational work undertaken at home. In so doing, it contributes to the emerging literature on emotional capital (Gillies, 2006; O’Brien, 2008; Reay, 2000, 2004).The concept of emotional capital builds on Bourdieu’s identification of social, cultural and symbolic capital as forms of power that grant privileges and legitimacy to their holders (Bourdieu, 1986). These types of capital are accumulated over time, through practices and dispositions that are recognized as holding particular value in a given social field. In the field of education, for example, such recognition is institutionalized through pedagogical and examination systems (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979, 1990). The concept of emotional capital implies that some forms of emotional labour also constitute and reproduce privilege in relation to the field of education, while other forms find limited purchase or may contribute to a sense of inadequacy and inferiority (Reay, 2004). The Bourdieusian framework is useful here for identifying how emotional labour is situated differently in relation to cultural, institutional and market hierarchies for a particular group of mothers who have moved between social fields through the process of migration.

Emotional capital theorizes the way that intimate personal connections can act as an important family resource (Allatt, 1993; Gillies, 2006; O’Brien, 2008; Reay, 2000, 2004). It involves ‘knowledge, contacts and relations as well as access to emotionally valued skills and assets, which hold within any social network characterized at least partly by affective ties’ (Nowotny, 1981: 148), including ‘love and affection, expenditure of time, attention, care and concern’ (Allatt, 1993: 143). Emotional capital, according to Reay (2004), fails to generate educational advantage when not combined with other forms of capital. She argues that a combination of ‘poverty, negative personal experiences of schooling, insufficient educational knowledge and lack of confidence’ and ‘low levels of dominant cultural capital, economic capital and social capital’ (Reay 2004: 64), diminish opportunities to develop emotional capital or convert this into educational benefit. Hence middle-class emotional investments in education may generate greater returns, being combined with high levels of cultural, social and economic capital. However, as Reay argues, providing emotional capital in support of children’s education may be at the expense of mothers’ own emotional wellbeing, and contribute to ‘intense class anxiety’ (Reay, 2004: 66). Here we argue that the relationship between emotional investment and other forms of capital changes when the social fields encountered by families are altered through the process of migration. Some forms of capital lose their value relative to institutional demands, while others are transformed or consolidated (Erel, 2010).

Bourdieu understands the social fields within which each individual and group is positioned to be internalized as a habitus – ‘a kind of transforming machine that leads us to “reproduce” the social conditions of our own production but in a relatively unpredictable way’ (1993: 87). The dispositions derived through socialization in the family through ‘gendered divisions of labour between the sexes, household objects, modes of consumption, parent–child relations, etc.’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 54) are identified as familial habitus that structures subsequent experiences of schooling (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 134). Although it is the product of early experiences, habitus is also an ‘open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 133).

While Bourdieu is particularly concerned with how habitus sets up a relationship with formal schooling, a focus maintained in work on emotional capital, for some groups emotional investment in children is connected to other purposes and settings (moral, developmental, religious). At the same time, a number of pressures increasingly compel parents to understand and evaluate their affective engagement in relation to children’s academic success. Bourdieu (1986) argues that investment in schooling intensified for all groups as occupational status and wealth became more tightly linked with academic qualifications in the 1960s, and increased participation meant that ever higher levels of qualification were needed to maintain or improve social position. The massification of school systems demands ‘reconversion strategies’ that involve transforming one type of capital into another ‘more accessible, more profitable or more legitimate form’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 125).

The more recent emergence of neoliberalism further tightens the connection between emotional labour and formal schooling. Economic restructuring has forced even greater reliance on educational qualifications and increasing the sanctions faced by those who fail to do well at school (Connell and Dados, 2014; Teese, 2000, 2007). At the same time, overall inequalities in wealth have become more polarized (Piketty and Goldhammer, 2014), further raising the stakes of schooling. The wages of the highest paid have grown, at the same time as there has been an increase in low-paid and precarious forms of employment in which women, immigrants and minority groups are concentrated (Lipman, 2004; Sanjek, 1998).

Neoliberalism can be defined both by the economic restructuring outlined above and by changes to subjectivity brought about as its consequences and by accompanying discourses of responsibilization. In Australian education, this is evident in reforms aimed at creating competition between schools, with parents called upon to ‘vote with their feet’ by confronting poorly performing schools, and enrolling their children in schools with better academic results. At the same time, the schools attended by marginalized populations have been starved of resources and support relative to those that serve more privileged groups. Rather than appearing as a problem for the system as a whole, the difficulties faced by public schools in working-class and migrant neighbourhoods are blamed upon individual schools, and on parents themselves. Successive governments have supported a policy of school choice which allows the most socially privileged schools to build control over curriculum and examination processes while exercising social and academic selection in enrolments (Windle, 2015). The result is social and ethnic polarization between schools (Lubienski, 2006; Mavisakalyan, 2012). Parents are made to feel responsible for their children’s educational fates through their educational decisions, generating anxiety (Campbell et al., 2009). In this competitive environment, mothers in particular face pressure to guarantee a place for their child in a ‘good’ school as a demonstration of maternal care. Migrant mothers who find themselves in neighbourhoods where schools have bad reputations struggle to compensate for what they see as lacking in these schools compared to others in the system (in terms of academic support, extra activities, order and even religious instruction). Some migrant parents describe local government schools as providing a basic minimum, a perception encouraged by the publication of league tables and heavy advertising by socially restricted schools (Windle, 2015). The neoliberal model of the family that chooses the best school further positions women as subordinate to the collective interests of the family (husband and children), dependent on the male family head, and confined to altruistic activities in promotion of the collective interests of the nuclear unit (Ferber and Nelson, 2003). The hollowing out of state-provided social services contributes to this positioning, as women must replace these services through unpaid domestic labour (Braedley and Luxton, 2010).

Motherhood and migration

According to Parreñas (2001), migration is often a process of contradictory social mobility. The situation of having university qualifications yet being unable to get a ‘good’ job in the host country is common. According to Ho (2006), in Australia skilled migrant women often experience downward occupational mobility and a reorientation away from professional life towards the home and family. Ho (2006: 498) describes the downward occupational mobility and intensification of domestic responsibilities experienced by highly skilled Chinese female migrants in her study as ‘feminization’. This transition has been variously theorized by others as de-skilling (Man, 2004), re-domestication (Yeoh and Willis, 2005) and, most recently, compromised careers (Suto, 2009).

The literature on migrant mothers suggests that they are often successful in directing emotional labour towards their children’s schooling, perhaps as a consequence of the circumstances that direct and confine them to the domestic sphere. Archer and Francis (2006), for example, attribute immigrant children’s academic success to their families’ ‘drawing upon and creating forms of social, cultural and economic capital and providing a habitus in which the expectation of mobility forms a central narrative’ (Archer and Francis, 2006: 42). In countries such as Australia, a perception of generalized immigrant academic success prevails and the project of migration is commonly founded, at least in part, on educational opportunities for children (Windle, 2004). However, the model of ethnic minority educational success does not hold true for all migrant groups (Platt, 2007). Mothers’ involvement can be limited by language barriers, limited formal education, limited economic resources, differences in child-rearing practices, physically demanding jobs, lack of social networks and cultural differences (Kim, 2009).

What counts as effective involvement is shaped by both institutional demands and discursive construction of the educational field, and by women’s own perception of their relationship to this field. Migrant mothers act, and interpret their actions, in relation to distinctive moral hierarchies – one internalized through the establishment of habitus prior to migration, and the second shaped by social and institutional conditions post-migration. The definition of ‘good’ motherhood is shaped by social norms about how mothers should act to produce children who are successful and productive within a given society (Austin and Carpenter, 2008), pathologizing those who do not meet the ideal (O’Brien, 2008). In the context of western neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of intensive mothering encompasses the view that child-rearing should be ‘expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive and financially expensive’ (Hays, 1996: 69).

According to Hays (1996: 54), the principles of intensive mothering, socially constructed so that they must be adhered to by women if they are to be identified as ‘good mothers’, include: (1) childcare is primarily the responsibility of the mother; (2) childcare should be child-centred; and (3) children ‘exist outside of market valuation, and are sacred, innocent and pure, their price immeasurable’. Intensive parenting ideology can be seen as entwined with neoliberalism − the process of ‘making’ the child offers a way of managing risk and life planning, ensuring children are turned into responsible citizens through attentive mothering (Vincent and Ball, 2007). This ideology defines women and promotes standards by which they are judged. Therefore it results in oppressive motherwork for women, constraining their agency to determine their own experience of mothering (O’Reilly, 2010). Moreover, mothers who cannot safely and continually live up to intensive mothering ideology ‘are labelled “unfit” mothers and find themselves and their mothering under public scrutiny and surveillance’ − hence anxiety, guilt and self-blame are brought to the lived experiences of mothering (O’Reilly, 2010: 20). According to Arendell (2000), a variety of deviancy discourses derive from this ideological construct of mothering, aimed differentially at mothers who do not follow this script, including welfare mothers, single mothers, immigrant mothers, lesbian mothers, birth mothers, adoptive mothers, and mothers of children with disabilities. The dominant mothering ideology is entwined with idealized notions of the white, western, middle-class, nuclear family − the experiences of mothers outside this image, such as mothers from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds – have been largely excluded. Migrant mothers have different perceptions and experiences of motherhood that are challenged, and may be seen as inferior, relative to the dominant social construction and discursive prescriptions of good mothering.

Migrant mothers may be confronted by two sets of conflicting constructions of mothering. They have moved to a land where the language, faith, traditions and rituals that have shaped their constructions of motherhood cease to be the norm. They face particular challenges, as they lose the social structure that supported their mothering values and encounter a new culture in which these orientations are questioned (Ochocka and Janzen, 2008). Within the limited literature on motherhood among migrant women, it has been suggested that women endure multiple burdens of motherhood due to difficulties resulting from migration (Liamputtong, 2001, 2006; Liamputtong and Naksook, 2003; Tummala-Narra, 2004). Lack of language proficiency is often the focus of emotional anxiety around participation in children’s education (Liamputtong, 2006) limiting many migrant women’s ability to view themselves as ‘good mothers’.

Religion is another focus of emotional tensions around the definition of motherhood for some migrant women, including those participating in the present study. A distinctive ideal of motherhood, framed in religious terms, is an important part of the identity of many Muslim women (Sered, 1996) and forms part of the habitus they mobilize to engage with schooling under conditions of neoliberalism, and migration. Religious framings of motherhood in terms of love, compliance, morality and selfless devotion (Oh, 2010) can be reinterpreted by mothers in relation to neoliberal demands to act strategically in relation to children’s formal schooling through intensive support and coaching. Similarly, the neoliberal repositioning of women within the domestic sphere can be interpreted by Muslim mothers as fitting with a view of child-rearing as a religious duty that is specially assigned to women, although feminist scholars have mobilized Islamic texts to argue against such interpretations (Ahmed, 1992; Wadud, 1999). In Islamic texts, mothers are described as objects of veneration and the nursing mother is described as performing moral work that deserves divine reward. However, traditional religio-cultural ideals regarding the family and mothers’ roles are interpreted and lived in new ways (Mernissi, 1987). Recently, gender relationships and role patterns within the family have witnessed remarkable changes in the western world as well as within Muslim families in the Arab world to some extent. The effects of global restructuring have entered the domestic sphere, influencing the way families and lives are managed in response to shifting work patterns, the increased need for childcare and changing responsibilities (David, 2004; Pusey, 2003). Within this context it seems women, and mothers in particular, are especially pressured by competing demands of housework, paid employment, caring and family responsibilities, and the increasing expectations to participate in the education of their children and support their education to succeed in a competitive world (Connell, 2011). Successful navigation of schooling for one’s children, when framed through Islamic discourses on education and motherhood, places a moral burden on Muslim mothers that differs from that produced by the therapeutic discourses of western motherhood. The pressures of neoliberalism have the power to link not only economic security and wellbeing to academic success, but also virtue and religious self-concept. However, as we will show, not all mothers interpret the obligation to educate in relation to formal schooling.

Here we analyse the situation of Muslim Iraqi mothers in Australia. The Iraqi population in Australia, including Muslim and Christian Iraqis, is largely the product of conflict. Iraq’s involvement in two wars (the Iran–Iraq war from 1980 to 1989 and the Gulf war in 1991), subsequent economic sanctions and the 2003 US/coalition invasion have had a devastating impact on the population and have been the major cause of emigration. Since 2003, almost 5 million Iraqis, around 20 per cent of the population at the time of the invasion, have become refugees with around half seeking refuge formally or illegally in Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East and later seeking migration abroad (Manderson and Vasey, 2009).

Methodology

The study was designed to examine the experiences of Muslim Iraqi migrant mothers in relation to their involvement in their children’s education, in particular the kinds of cultural and social resources upon which these mothers draw. The study employed a qualitative approach, which allows for an in-depth exploration of participants’ experiences, perceptions and beliefs. The purposive sample was recruited through community associations and then snow-balling in the Australian city of Melbourne. In total, 25 mothers were recruited, with all but 3 being interviewed at least twice. Data was collected through audio-taped, face- to-face, semi-structured interviews conducted in Arabic, the participants’ as well as the first author’s native language.

The majority of participants lived in areas with a relatively high population of migrants and low socioeconomic status (Al-Khudairi, 2005). All of the mothers had children enrolled in public and/or private (including Islamic) primary and/or secondary schools in 2010. All had resided in Australia for a minimum of two years and held permanent resident visas or were Australian citizens. These mothers came from different parts of Iraq, mainly from the south and centre. The women and/or their husbands and children were forced out of their country by war, life- threatening situations and intolerable living conditions. Among these women, only two were in paid employment, although some of them were tertiary educated and had jobs in Iraq. Seven of them held Bachelor’s degrees, four held TAFE (technical and further education) diplomas, and three had completed secondary school, and the remaining eleven had at most incomplete secondary school studies.

Our analysis began with examination of the influence cultural and social resources on engagement with children’s education. We borrowed Reay’s (1998) list of seven main components of cultural capital which she developed in her study on mothers’ involvement in their children’s primary schooling. The seven aspects of cultural capital were: ‘Material resources; educational qualifications; available time; information about the educational system; social confidence; educational knowledge, and the extent to which entitlement, assertiveness, aggression, or timidity characterized mothers’ approaches to teaching staff’ (Reay, 1998: 59). We added English-language competency to the list as another important component of cultural capital for the mothers in this study. Our data show that level of involvement was not necessarily explained by the level of cultural capital mothers held, but that cultural capital helped to explain the extent to which mothers’ involvement was effective in relation to formal schooling and articulated through the mobilization of emotional capital. Effective involvement in formal schooling, in the context of this study, refers to mothers’ involvement which results in maximizing academic gains for their children. This might involve support to bring a struggling child up to the level of peers, to ensure a child consistently receives good grades, or to prepare a child for competitive entrance examinations for academically selective schools. Below we present analysis of data selected as representative of the three main relationships between emotional labour and other forms of capital identified in the study.

The consolidation of emotional capital

Mothers with high levels of cultural capital, and who were closely involved in supporting their children’s schooling in a way that they felt to be effective, experienced a sense of emotional reinforcement and moral fulfilment that was framed by Quranic verses, Prophetic Hadith and historical stories. Aseel (unemployed, Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, husband unemployed, and with a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering) stated:

I don’t leave my children until I make sure that they understand everything in whatever activity they do in any subject.… Prophet Muhammad did not say: ‘Heaven is under the feet of mothers’ [Prophetic Hadith] for nothing. We should fulfil our duty to deserve heaven to be under our feet.

Mothers such as Aseel assume that engaging with children’s education at home is their responsibility, perceiving it as an action which demonstrates their ‘good’ mothering. Although both she and her husband had lost their professional status and economic capital through the process of migration, Aseel focused her energies on consolidating the family’s cultural capital through support of her children’s academic careers. Her reading of motherly duties as a religious calling specifically for women meant that her husband, also unemployed, nevertheless played a very limited role in such support.

Mothers with high levels of cultural capital, such as Aseel, were best able to translate their emotional labour into effective educational strategies, and thus experience a return both in children’s learning, and in their capacity to emotionally sustain their involvement. Aseel was able to support her children in terms of the organization of their time and dedication to specific tasks, assistance and monitoring of the cognitive aspects of school work, and motivation. Her sense of competency in each of these domains was based on her ability to familiarize herself with the organizational and cognitive demands of Australian classrooms, and to assess her children’s performance in relation to both these demands, and the structures for access to privileged educational pathways. The satisfaction that Aseel felt in this domestic accomplishment took on an amplified significance in light of the fact that she declared herself to be unemployed and the only chance she had to apply her professional skills as a civil engineer was in homework support.

The process of migration and downward social mobility – measured by professional status – gives greater importance to the affective rewards of good parenting. A heightened investment in guaranteeing educational success can be seen as aimed at re-establishing the family’s social position (Bourdieu, 1984: 135). While for fathers, high rates of unemployment presented an existential problem to be resolved, for mothers it could be reframed as a choice that provides evidence of good mothering.

This reframing connects with ‘the neoliberal rhetoric of context-free choice’ that allows a restoration of traditional images of motherhood (Connell, 2011: 48). Lamyaa, for example, believed that a good mother should always be there for her children, and it was motherhood rather than other social identities that most strongly shaped her actions. Lamyaa held a Bachelor of Science degree and was not in paid employment, her husband was a mechanical engineer. Her desire to give her children a strong foundation, particularly in education, caused her to leave a promising career in science. Her decision enabled her to devote extensive emotional labour to supporting her children, contributing to her sense of wellbeing and feelings of success as a mother:

I miss my job but, as a mother, I feel that my not working decision was right. Now I can spend time with my kids and be here for them anytime they need me.… Being at home after school for the children is very important…. You need to be sitting with them, talking to them, listening to their concerns, helping with homework things like that. I can’t do this if I am working…. There’s no point in me working when they need me.

The ideology of mothering that these mothers adopted is not dissimilar to that of intensive mothering. Therefore they perceive sacrificing their career as socially valued, morally good and culturally normative. The key to self-actualization, fulfilment and sense of good mothering of mothers like Lamyaa was located in their stay-at-home mothering (Hays 1996). Hays maintains that mothers have been persuaded to see children as priceless and that their individual mothering must involve tremendous amounts of time, energy and money in order to be a ‘good’ mother. Likewise we argue that this codification of ‘good’ mothering is socially constructed and deeply rooted in powerful Islamic and Iraqi cultural discourses about mothering. The cult of domesticity, which emphasizes the nurturing and caring performed by mothers in the private sphere, is strongly supported by the mothers’ religion and culture. It is further reinforced by the process of migration, as women find themselves excluded from other fields, and consequently investing more heavily in a domestic field. The neoliberal processes of individualization of responsibility for children’s academic success within an educational marketplace add to this domestic emotional burden.

For mothers with high levels of cultural capital and close involvement in their children’s schooling who were in paid employment, their work was viewed as secondary to their role in supporting their children. Iman, for example, reported that she spent more time caring for her children than her husband did:

We are both working but I am still the one who is intensively responsible for taking care of my kids. I would take some time off if one of them gets sick or if they have an activity at school such as parent/teacher interview. It is always me who does all the care work including the educational work. I think it wouldn’t really be accepted if he takes time off to look after the kids or goes to school. It might also affect his job.… If I lose my job or stay at home to look after the kids, it shouldn’t be a big problem. I mean I have the choice to stay at home but he doesn’t. He is a man and he should work.… You know it is socially accepted this way.

The ‘ontological complicity’ of ‘female habitus’ in this case is expressed in the way mothers ‘feel they were made for their mothering’ (Reay, 1998: 60). The idea of mothers as the ‘natural carer’ is embedded in mothers’ habitus and reinforced in moral and ideological discourses. As a result they do not problematize the gendered division of labour in terms of involvement in their children’s education.

Mothers’ educational experiences with their own mothers, which are rooted in their habitus, are important here. Reay (2004: 65) suggests that there are ‘generational aspects of emotional capital in that reserves are built up in families over time’. Aseel, for example, stated that she did well at school with the intensive support and encouragement she received from her mother:

She [her mother] was always there for me…. I remember when I was in year 12, she used to wake me up at 5a.m. to study for the exams but she wouldn’t go back to sleep. She would sit next to me pretending that she was reading a book so she would wake me up in case I fell asleep … without her support, I wouldn’t have had a good education.

Many of the emotions that these mothers experienced during their involvement in their children’s education were negative, such as, anxiety, frustration and anger. Yet, they often promoted good academic achievement. It is this perception of effectiveness that allowed both positive and negative emotions to function as a form of capital, in combination with cultural capital and articulated through a religious moral framework. Mothers with high levels of cultural capital felt empowered and confident to engage in their children’s education and to position themselves as the ‘educational expert’ (Reay and Ball, 1998: 435). However, in a few rare cases, these negative emotions may bring mothers into conflict with their children (Reay, 2004).

Anxiety was generated in the course of mothers’ involvement in marketized schooling, particularly because they had high expectations of their children’s education and perceive their children to be located in schools that are low in the market hierarchy. In this situation, there was a cost for mothers as well as for children as some forced their children into extremely intensive study regimes in order to gain access to higher prestige educational sites (through entrance examinations and scholarship tests). Sahar (unemployed, year 12 equivalent; husband is a taxi driver, Bachelor’s degree in political science) argued that she was always anxious and unhappy with the standard of education at her daughter’s local high school. Since Sahar was financially unable to move her daughter to a private school, she decided her daughter would sit for the selective school entry test:

She is preparing for the test. She went to one of the tutoring centres during the summer holiday to be prepared for selective school entrance…. She should pass the test and get in because she will get so much more out of it…. It is true that I am pushing so much and I know she should enjoy the holiday but I am doing this for her benefit.

Even though Sahar attempted to enhance her daughter’s cultural capital, there may be a negative impact on her child’s emotional wellbeing as she puts her under academic pressure to pass the admission test. If there are hidden costs for Sahar’s daughter, then emotional capital can be seen to be devalued (Reay, 2004). While Sahar and other mothers admitted that their children may suffer from doing a large amount of educational work on a daily basis, they also denied this emotional cost since they perceived high academic achievement as a door to their children’s future happiness. Thus, from this perspective, if emotional capital is to be seen as totally linked to academic achievement and the enhancement of cultural capital, then it possibly would be at the cost of mothers’ and their children’s emotional wellbeing (Reay, 2004).

Increased emotional cost and ‘bad mother’ crises

A second group of mothers similarly associated the fulfilment of religious duties with support of formal schooling, but did not possess the kinds of cultural and social capital that would allow their emotional labour to receive dividends as capital. Following and managing school work became difficult due to language barriers, unfamiliarity with the education system, lack or lower level of educational qualifications, and lack of access to high volume social capital and financial resources. Fathers, as a few mothers indicated, may play a role in their children’s schooling, particularly when mothers are not able to effectively engage. Yet in some families neither of the parents was able to support their children’s schooling in the ways they would have liked. Ahlam (unemployed, year 12 graduate; husband unemployed, year 12 graduate), identified a number of obstacles:

If the language was Arabic, we would have been able to teach them…. We can’t send them to tutoring centres either. We live on welfare…. My husband doesn’t have qualification…. We both couldn’t go to university because of the economic sanctions [in Iraq] at that time.… We want them to succeed and have good education in this country. I am so worried about their education, especially my son’s because he is not doing well at school.… I feel sometimes that I am a bad mother.

Ahlam noted the devaluation of her cultural capital in the transition to an English-language education system, and the impossibility of substitution strategies, such as tutoring, due to a lack of economic capital. However, she also highlighted a form of transnational domination that is ignored in Bourdieu’s framework (Connell, 2007). The family’s situation has been shaped not merely by cultivation or inheritance of different forms of capital, but by the brutal violence of war and sanctions. With economic and social destruction severely limiting the couple’s life opportunities, they focus their investments on the academic and professional success of the next generation. Their inability to offer anything other than emotional encouragement in relation to formal schooling creates a cycle of frustration and undermines the emotional capital associated with positive self-perception as a ‘good’ mother.

Mothers with limited English, but with educational credentials gained in Iraq, keenly felt a loss of competency in the new setting. Heba (unemployed, diploma of children’s service, husband is a taxi driver, Bachelor’s degree in Arts), for example, commented on her lack of familiarity with the curriculum:

Back home I used to help my kids with their homework…. If you ask me a question about any of their school subjects, I would tell you which page you can find the answer. Now I feel frustrated because I haven’t been doing my role as I used to…. Everything has become vague. I almost know nothing about the curriculum.… I feel sometimes I am not a good mother as I used to be in Iraq.

Like newly arrived migrant mothers in Reay’s study, participants in this study had to ‘deal with a situation in which their cultural capital has been devalued’ (1998: 65). This lack of recognition and legitimacy undermined mothers’ emotional capital, not only in relation to the field of education but also to the moral and religious obligations of family and community. As a result, mothers like Heba and Ahlam perceived themselves as bad mothers since they believed that a good mother should be fully responsible for her children, particularly for their education.

These mothers’ sense of ‘good’ mothering derives from full engagement in their children’s schooling and responsibility for children’s successful outcomes. They internalized the ideology of intensive mothering but it was not possible for them due to lack of resources, both financial and in relation to social and cultural capital that comes with higher levels of education and income. According to the codification of ‘good’ mothering, these mothers felt unable to influence their children’s education while still being held responsible for it. This is one potential explanation for their greater level of concern about the responsibility for mothering properly.

Sustained emotional costs and resilience

Some mothers had limited involvement in supporting the formal schooling of their children. Most of these mothers had had to drop out of primary school and get married at an early age due to wars, economic sanctions and family obligations. In addition to a lack of resources such as formal academic qualifications, familiarity with the education system, English proficiency and lack of access to high volume social capital, these mothers’ reports suggest a lack of self-confidence, self-interest and sense of entitlement in relation to their involvement, since they themselves had little formal education. Some did not have high expectations of their children’s education. This different relationship to schooling reflects a different habitus, derived from their own life experiences, particularly their childhood encounters with their parents, who were not educated themselves and did not have high expectations of them. The mothers in this group who attached a greater priority to their children’s schooling relied on indirect forms of involvement, such as facilitating support in their children’s education from siblings and friends. Since such mothers usually did not experience a great loss in their perceived competency as mothers through the process of migration, they were less likely to experience the feeling of dissonance and inadequacy that characterized those mothers who were heavily involved but had limited cultural capital.

Some of these mothers’ accounts indicated a powerful push for change and a clear idea of repairing the damage of their own education in relation to their children’s: rather than replicating their habitus, they were attempting ‘transformation of habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 87). However, in practice, they had a minimal or no role in their children’s formal schooling since they did not possess the resources to do as they wished. As Sukaina (unemployed, grade 6 equivalent, husband unemployed, Bachelor’s degree in business administration) stated: ‘I wish I can help them with their homework or sometimes even know what they do at school but I can’t, as you know “an empty hand has nothing to give” [Arabic proverb].’

In light of this, such mothers reported that their children had become more independent and taken control over their own education. Bushra (unemployed, year 10 equivalent, husband unemployed, year 12 equivalent) regarded her children as autonomous people who could make their own decisions, take responsibility for regulating their own homework, and generally manage schooling matters themselves, without the need for their parents’ involvement: ‘They know more than me and their father … they do their homework and study without any support…. I don’t interfere in their education.’ However, underlying the parents’/mothers’ apparent passivity and the children’s autonomy regarding educational matters were complex issues contributing to the mothers’ lack of power, which were often set against children’s apparent power and agency in these matters (Reay and Ball, 1998). It could be that these children were responsible for their educational activities at home from their mothers’ perspective only, but they may not actually be, according to the terms of the education system.

Most mothers in this study were concerned about and supported their children’s Arabic literacy learning. Interview data suggest some mothers, particularly those who were not able to engage effectively with their children’s school education either at home or at school, found themselves in a situation where they had to show some involvement in other areas, such as children’s learning of Arabic, to feel a sense of good mothering. Also, since the role of ‘guardian of the home language’ (Blackledge, 2001: 352) is ascribed to mothers, there may be pressure from within their families and community for these mothers to continue to teach their children the Arabic language, as family and community solidarity is seen to be achieved through maintenance of the language of their home country and their holy book (Qur’an). Their comments indicated that teaching their children Arabic at home was clearly important in the lives of these mothers and their children. Nedhal (unemployed, grade 6 equivalent, husband was a taxi driver, year 12 equivalent) stated:

It is my full responsibility to make sure that they learn Arabic…. My daughters are doing really well at Arabic. They can read and write. They can read Qur’an and they learnt many surah [Quranic surah] by heart. I teach them Arabic almost every day at home. Many Iraqi mothers from the community always say to me: you should be proud of your daughters because they can read Qur’an. Not many kids here know how to read Qur’an.

However, one of her daughters, she mentioned, had to repeat a school year when she was in grade 2 and she still performed below the expected level in English. Nedhal possessed a particular cultural and linguistic capital which had value in the domains of her home and community. In their own community, Nedhal and most mothers were confident and successful, with some of them working as volunteers to teach Arabic and Qur’an in the Iraqi community ethnic schools.

Conclusion

This article has contributed to the literature on emotional capital by showing how the emotional labour of migrant mothers can produce contrasting effects. Muslim Iraqi mothers in Australia with high levels of cultural capital and a sense of confidence in their management of children’s schooling gained a double return on their emotional labour – it both found purchase on the Australian education system for their children and gave them a sense of fulfilment of religious obligations. Those mothers who were unable to support their children’s school work at organizational and cognitive levels also found that their emotional labour was undermined by feelings of frustration and inadequacy. These feelings were most acute among those mothers whose cultural capital had been devalued through the process of migration. They paid a double price of investment without return, and an undermining of their sense of themselves as good Muslim mothers. In both cases, the processes of neoliberalism that raise the stakes of schooling, and polarize access to different educational sites, worked to increase anxieties and confirm emotional and domestic labour as a moral responsibility assigned to women (Connell, 2011). A third group interpreted their religious obligations to educate their children in terms that were not articulated with formal, marketized schooling. Instead, with limited involvement in formal schooling both prior to, and post-migration, their educational efforts focused on literacy in Arabic, and cultural and religious education. Their engagement with the moral regime of Islamic motherhood, valorized dispositions and practices that did not generate the kind of existential crisis felt by mothers whose scholastic capital had been devalued.

These findings serve to show how the power granted by particular sets of dispositions and practices is always relative to the institutional and social recognition they are granted. A habitus of motherhood framed in religious terms finds itself strengthened and reinterpreted through the processes of migration and neoliberalism that focus women’s efforts in the domestic sphere. Variations in emotional investments and return are a product not merely of the habitus that mothers bring with them from their own childhood experiences and moral reference points, but the opportunities and constraints they encounter.

The study thus shows how cultural and religious norms are reinterpreted and remade in changing material and institutional circumstances. Bourdieu’s framework is valuable for identifying how individual resources and dispositions may be transformed into social power, however it overlooks the processes of neo-imperialism and war that constitute a more brutal and violent form of power and drive migration and shape mothers’ emotional engagement with children’s schooling. These processes include the demonization of Islam and Muslims, US-led sanctions, invasions and occupations, and the devaluing of non-western models of child-rearing. More subtle transnational processes, including economic transformations and educational marketization, further shape outlooks and engagements in ways not always captured in Bourdieusian analyses. Further longitudinal and ethnographic work is needed in order to identify more clearly how the emotional labour of migrant mothers is produced, reproduced and transformed in the context of neoliberal schooling

Immigrant mothers’ identities and wellbeing are heavily influenced by ideologies of motherhood, which determine the ways they evaluate their emotional labour and judgements of the effectiveness of their educational efforts (as well as the form those efforts take). In order for migrant mothers’ educational work to be valued and respected, it is necessary to challenge the discursive and economic structures that maintain a narrow motherhood ideology, and open up space for a pluralist and creative vision of motherhood, which may not even involve that term. Further, it is necessary for the kinds of knowledge and practices that are valued and recognized within schools to be broadened and made more reflective of culturally diverse and working-class populations. The project of democratizing the curriculum, and involvement in educational processes, along the multiculturalist lines proposed by Olneck (1993), offers ideas for a way forwards.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Biographical notes

Taghreed Jamal Al-deen is Associate Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University.

Joel Windle is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Federal University of Ouro Preto (Brazil), and Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Education, Monash University (Australia). His research focuses on educational inequalities and linguistic diversity.

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