Creative Parenting in Transnational Families and the Gender Diagonal

Having followed immigrant families (coming from North Africa), in France, in Belgium and in the Netherlands over long periods as ethnographic observer and biographical-narrative interviewer, I have recurrently been impressed by the centrality of the parents’ project for a better life: for themselves, for their kin at home, and especially for their children (boys and girls) whom they invest with the responsibility of carrying on further this project. This project drives all their courses of action under harsh life conditions.  Deprived of “capital” such as money, education, or “useful connections” (all “objective” resources), they can only mobilize their “subjective” resources, that is to say: themselves, their energies, their reflexivity, their character and creativity. A lot of creative parenting takes place in their homes.

In patriarchal societies where these parents come from, gender contrasts are very sharp. They entail differences in the hopes and aspirations that are projected onto sons and daughters by father and mother. Initially, fathers will tend to project upon their sons their own frustrated upward mobility aspirations. They expect good grades at school. Some sons will live up to their father’s expectations; but others will not, while some of their sisters will do better. In such cases the father’s hopes will move over the years from his son to his daughter. It is this phenomenon that we have come to call “the diagonal of generations”, or “the gender diagonal”.

This comes on top of the host society’s differential discrimination, which is stronger on boys. To avoid the damaging consequences of rivalries between brothers and sisters, and eventual splits, parents have to find ways to teach them to resist stigmatization (or “discredit”). We will show how family relationships are continuously shifting, under these dynamics, necessitating a continuous effort of creativity in parenting.