Inadequacies of parenting: How ethnicity, migrant experience and class shape welfare bureaucrats’ assessments of parenthood

Welfare policies often reflect long-term cultural assumptions about diverse social roles and activities, with family policies incorporating explicit and implicit normative notions of parenthood and parenting, young children’s care or their education. How parents with migrant backgrounds and their parenting practices ‘fit’ into these culturally pervasive ideals – or not – has rarely been investigated despite a growing literature on transnational families and their meanings, practices and ideals of ‘doing family’ transnationally. Relying on ethnographic data from Denmark and Romania, this paper explores how face-to-face encounters between welfare bureaucrats and new parents often involve bureaucrats’ mobilisation of particular conceptions of parenting. Through observation and in-depth interview material with home-visiting nurses and new parents in Denmark and with frontline welfare workers and new parents claiming family entitlements in Romania, we show that welfare bureaucratic encounters are instances when parents with migrant experiences – first- and second-generation immigrants in Denmark and Romanian nationals having lived abroad – are almost invariably ‘cast’ as particular kinds of parents. Their usually negative casting is based on a variety of ‘inadequacies’ relating to new mothers’ and fathers’ parenting practices and responsibilities, inadequacies which in both Denmark and Romania are seen in light of ‘old-fashioned’ and, in Denmark, sometimes ‘foreign’ ways of parenting. In exploring the different ‘caveats’ that welfare bureaucrats signal and/or articulate through the narratives of both bureaucrats and new parents, we show how migratory background inadvertently challenges the category of the ‘good parent’ as a central element of ‘the’ family. In addition to ethnicity (in Denmark and Romania) or experience of living abroad (in Romania), however, we find that class distinctions also play a significant role in constructions of inadequacy in parenting practices. Our analysis reveals that ‘technologies of migranticisation’ are not restricted to citizenship and migration policies, but permeate welfare policy domains also; and are not reserved for individuals and families who might be cast as ethnically other, but potentially for anyone with some history of some European mobility, as the Romanian case illustrates.