Parental care in trajectories of forced migration: ruptures and changing conditions for rebuilding family life

Forced migration has a major impact on family life while increasingly restrictive immigration and integration regimes make everyday life of refugee families hyper-precarious. Critical events and changing conditions of everyday life on personal, social, societal and global levels call for innovative research questions and methods enabling the development of conceptualisations in order to grasp the complexity of the current social reality of refugee families and social workers alike. Most social work and psychological research on parental care in refugee families draw on a deficit perspective focusing on the parent-child relationship based on attachment and trauma theory. Some research points to a spiral of multiple loss and consequential limited socio-economic resources that seriously challenge parents in the process of rebuilding everyday life, but without offering new conceptualizations concerning parental care. With this gap in research concerning parenting in light of forced migration in a contextual and social psychological perspective, the paper will pursue the following questions: How is parental care being shaped and challenged in the disruptive trajectories of forced migration and demanding processes of rebuilding everyday family life in Denmark? The paper explores this process empirically and by unfolding an analytical understanding of parental care as part of different structures of social practice shaped by the participation of family members in different contexts. By drawing on a subject-theoretical perspective on the mutuality of family members and others, the analysis shows how parental care are moulded by multiple disruptions in trajectories of forced migration and hyper-precarious conditions in Denmark. The analysis draws on an ethnographically inspired practice research study conducted in cooperation with five Syrian families while they were awaiting asylum and during their first year with a temporary permit in Denmark. The paper offers empirical insight and unfolds a conceptualization of parental to strengthen the focus on the reciprocity of children and parents in the light of everyday challenges of refugee families in social work.