Home abroad: Eastern European children’s family and peer relationships after migration

Abstract

IntroductionContemporary patterns of global mobility have led to an increase in the number of families who live separated by borders. Migration is 'a special case of the development of social networks' (Eve, 2010), and its effects on families have only recently become subject of in-depth investigation. The importance of children's relationships for their development, well-being and life opportunities has been emphasised by research. In this article, we are interested in how children's relationships are affected by family migration, and how they adapt to the need to reconfigure their networks, through ties maintained with their homelands and new relationships developed post-migration. Family migration engages children in a variety of social, cultural and emotional settings which represent the contexts within which their networks develop. As the significance of social networks has been extensively discussed in research with adults (Ryan, 2011;McGhee et al., 2013), we think it is important to turn our attention to the role of children's networks.This paper reviews first the theoretical and research underpinnings of social network analysis to the study of children's relationships and argues for the need of a more nuanced examination of children's multiple networks, as reconfigured by migration. We also examine the extent to which children are empowered agents in the processes of network mobilisation and review the factors that influence children's networks, including parents' decisions, place, social class and ethnicity. Transnationalism, family networks and children's agencyResearch with migrant adults has shown how the pressures of succeeding in the new country and maintaining links with those left behind represent 'competing obligations' (McGhee et al., 2013), with significant emotional strain for both migrants and families left behind. Studies have examined how households continue to function across borders, and how migration calls for a redistribution of traditional divisions of labour.For instance, practices of 'caring at a distance' (Baldassar, 2007) or 'transnational mothering' (Parreñas, 2005) are common, with migrating adults doing the caring and supporting of children over the phone. However, children are more than just passive recipients of their parents' migration decisions (Knörr, 2005). Forms of resistance, such as arguing or complaining, are used to influence adults' decisions and to put pressure on parents to return.Studies on children who migrate with their families have shown how concerns about children's future and welfare are key influences in adults' decisions to migrate (Orellana et al., 2001). Recent calls to examine migrant children's agency are based on the 'competent child' approach (Bak and Brömssen, 2010), inspired by the new sociology of childhood (James et al., 1998). Migration causes significant changes in the power dynamics of the parent-child relationships. Children, for example, become cultural brokers for families (Schaeffer, 2013), as they learn the language more quickly through s...

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Transnational intergenerationalities: cultural learning in Polish migrant families and its implications for pedagogy

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Relations between Child Poverty and New Migrant Child Status, Academic Attainment and Social Participation: Insights Using Social Capital Theory

“…In a letter to the European Council in May 2014 (see [17]) 38 leading organizations, including UNICEF and Save the Children, urged Member States to address the issue of migrant children's rights, because of their underachievement and marginalisation. Evidence from our research and that of others indicates that children of migrants are marginalised in terms of educational opportunities [18][19][20][21], access to services [22,23] and civic participation [24]. In Scotland, the Government has recently proposed to invest an additional £100 million in education to tackle the attainment gap of all groups [25]-data on the educational attainment of recently arrived migrant children not disaggregated.…”

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