Polish migrants in Germany: challenges and inequalities in raising children in transnational social spaces

Abstract

The transfer of cultural capital across borders is a common topic in transnational sociology. While the majority of studies investigates the opportunities and challenges of adult migrants and their social mobility in transnational social spaces, children in transnational social spaces are predominantly acknowledged either as indicators for their migrant population's mobility rates or as 'left-behinds'. While the first branch of literature investigates migrant population only in relation to the immigration country, the other does argue from a transnational perspective yet the ramifications and challenges of co-present parent-child relations in transnational social spaces are an understudied topic. This article aims to raise awareness that the ways migrants raise their children in transnational social spaces is a crucial site to study the broader topic of the modes of the (re-)production of transnational social spaces. This is so because the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital is the main mechanism operating in the reproduction of unequal social structures and therefore also of transnational social spaces. Based on twenty semi-structured interviews with migrants from Poland in Germany, this article sheds light on migrant parents' childrearing orientations in relation to language and education. The article reveals that despite fairly similar orientations, parents have, dependent on their cultural capital, very different opportunities to fulfill their parenting needs.