Parents as both problem and resource: the political management of parenting in marginalised residential areas

This article addresses the question of how the parenting role has become an issue in relation to the contemporary politics of marginalized residential areas in Denmark. Drawing on the empirical and analytic categories of 'good' and 'bad' parenting, we explore how parenting skills and parental responsibility are central to problem solving and finding solutions for the area. We explore this to achieve a more critical approach to understanding how different discourses of integration and marginalized residential areas, create categories of ‘parenting’. The analysis shows how policies have different kinds of impact on parents in the neighbourhood, and how discourses on parenting vary across the empirical material including governmental strategies, social master plans, and interviews. Despite, in political terms, being regarded as part of the problem, the parents themselves shape their child