Parenting as/in Crisis. Transcultural constructions of parenting and parenthood – A Report

By Tina Jane Lupton and Daria Schwalbe.

This workshop was informal, designed to generate new ideas and collaborations around parenting as a central part of the immigrant, refugee and ethnic minorities' experience, and a key site of cultural difference and cross-cultural understanding. It gathered a cross-disciplinary group of scholars who engaged with conceptualizations and ideologies of parenting and childhood, parental child healthcare, family violence, responsibility, and mental illnesses in different socio-cultural contexts, from anthropological, historical, linguistic, literary, psychological and psychiatric perspectives.

Parenting is often assumed to be universal, something we all know how to value and even do. Parents and parenting are considered to be central to providing support and a sense of safety and security for children, especially during times of crisis, whereas ‘bad’ parenting is seen as a major cause of childhood and developmental traumas, which may trigger mental health problems later in life [1, 2].

Yet, the pandemic, war, and mass migration in recent years put many families and family relations to the test. Building on the Western model of childhood that insists on the need to protect children’s well-being and their unique innocence and purity [3] as a point of departure, these developments provoked further surveillance and more intervention from authorities all around the world. Some counselling programs and therapeutic initiatives, directed at parents and the mental health of children who are victims of violence and who have experienced trauma as part of their upbringing have grown significantly.

In European media reports and political debates, we constantly hear about the parenting crisis in Europe. Headlines like “How to talk to your children about conflict and war,” “How to discipline your child the smart and healthy way,” “How parents can support their children and themselves following distressing events,” “How to practice positive parenting during the crisis,” “11 tips for communicating with your teen,” and so on constantly remind us about, what ‘good parenting’ is, or supposed to be, and how we, as parents, are supposed to think and act. Global parenting programs that aim to prepare and support families during recent crises, in their distress and transition, are being rolled out across the Globe (e.g., UNICEF Global Parenting Initiatives, MANU in Greenland, the MindSpring (MS) intervention in Denmark, which serves as an early group intervention for newly arrived refugees, etc.).

In the North American Arctic, children might still be removed from their parents and put into foster homes, as part of colonial thinking, which is anchored in the need to protect children from harm. Whereas in Russia, where the pandemic alone reduced the Russian population to 1,3 million people, violence against women, children and elderly people has been on the rise since the pandemic, and parents are reported to forcefully place their transgendered children into psychiatric hospitals ‘to be healed’ [4].

In this workshop, we discussed how parenting (and parenthood) is subject to both sociocultural and historical variation. As a pressure point for policymakers, service providers, and individuals, parenting raises questions of social and cultural belonging, equality, and futurity. When parenting takes place under the inauspicious conditions of war, cultural displacement, poverty, or illness these questions are amplified further by the suspension or relativization of normality. 

We opened this workshop with the following questions in mind:

1. How can cross-cultural understanding and practices, policies and ideologies, related to parenting and parenthood, contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the parenting experiences and pathologies of parenthood resulting from warfare, migration, pandemic, colonialism/ intergenerational traumas and mass violence?
2. How can psychiatrists, anthropologists and social scientists support migrant parents with children whose lives are bound to displacement, uncertainties, traumas, and loss, and who often need to make sense of their lives within the walls of an asylum?
3. Which tools and counselling programs should be provided to those parents who have been traumatized, and to the refugee children whose parents suffer from mental illnesses?
4. What can we learn about parenting in crisis from previous experiences and cross-cultural comparison?

The workshop began with two papers focused on non-Danes' life in Denmark. In the first Anita spoke about her experiences as a mother in the Danish asylum system and in the second Marta Kirilova reported on her fieldwork – and her own experiences – amongst Bulgarian-speaking parents in Copenhagen. 

In our second session, we heard from Ida Ghiai, Social advisor at the Competence Center for Transcultural Psychiatry (CTP), who told us about her work with immigrant and refugee children whose parents have psychiatric disorders; and from Maria Marti Castaner, who had done fieldwork amongst the families in the Danish home visiting program for refugee families. Both cases offered a glimpse of the Danish state’s efforts to address and support the children and parents of families in usual situations, either of mental health crises or because they were away from their cultural support networks at the point of becoming parents in Denmark. Marie Meier, who closed the session, talked about various ways families have dealt with mental illnesses among relatives across time and place and the impact of the biomedical turn on a transfer of responsibility between families and the Danish state. 

We then heard from four scholars working in other parts of the world: Anna Topova spoke about the role of cinema in the lives of Russian children growing up in Russia in the era of Stalin’s Russia. Vera Skvirskaja spoke about the lives of families in the Russian war in Ukraine. Gabriel Abarca Brown described encounters between health institutions, practitioners, and Haitian and Dominican communities in twenty-first-century Chile. Whereas Daria Schwalbe spoke about the power of traditional family ideologies in Russia, and about the ongoing systemic violence and injustice against Inuit families in the United States as part of colonial power structures and thinking.

We ended with two papers focused on literary examples: Martyn Bone used the fiction of Jesmyn Ward to discuss new structures of family and kinship in the American South and Emily Hogg discussed the different kinds of temporality at play in two recent US accounts of parenting and work.

At the end of the day, we could see strong threads of discussion emerging around language use, around the way the Danish state system did and did not support families in crisis, and the way discourses of children’s welfare have featured historically in different state projects, and which frame therapeutic practices and interventions in various parts of the world.

References

[1] Aagaard Tine, Hounsgaard Lise, Øgaard Anders. 2020. Menneske: sundhed, samfund og kultur. 1. udgave. Aagaard Tine, Hounsgaard Lise, Øgaard Anders, editors. Aarhus: Klim.

[2] Ottendahl CB, Bjerregaard P, Svartá DL, Sørensen IK, Olesen I, Nielsen MS, et al. 2021. Mental sundhed og helbred blandt 15-34-årige i Grønland [Internet]. København; 2021 [cited 2023 Mar 29].

[3] Antic, Ana. 2022. Introduction: Politicising Children: Transcultural Constructions of Childhood and Psychological Trauma in the Modern World. Cult Med Psychiatry.

[4] Secher, Mikkel. 2024. Putin fører kamp mod Vestens "forfald", men nogle russiske familier tager sagen i egen hånd, TV2 News, 4.02.2024.

[4] Elliot Davis, “Russia Begins Invasion of Ukraine” US News & World Report, 23.02. 2022.

Topics