Fraught parenting: Immigrant parents’ chronic double-bind in Denmark

Abstract

This article explores how a group of immigrant parents in Denmark’s largest social housing project, Gellerupparken, are caught in a chronic double-bind position. The parents are straddling two sets of social norms and rationalities on proper parenting—that of the Danish welfare state and that of the local immigrant community—and their success of becoming attuned to the social norms of one particular relationship inevitably leads to their experience of radical othering in another relationship. This places them in a doubly marginal position and makes their parenting practices fraught with dilemmas and anxieties. I argue that the notion of the double-bind provides us with a heuristic for understanding the parents’ everyday experiences of marginality, stressing that marginalization is not only to be understood as produced by and productive of the state, but by the interface between the state and vitally important actors in the immigrant community and family.