Partnership, Parenthood and Beyond: Between Traditional and Progressive Ways of Doing Polish Family in Ireland

This chapter employs a life course perspective to examine the gendered patterns of practices within Polish families in Ireland, particularly their approaches to work and caregiving. This perspective views migration as a significant ‘turning point’ and highlights the temporal aspects of practices, shaped by the interplay between Polish migrants’ cultural background, family status, economic standing and Ireland’s family policy and family service provision. The resulting picture is complex: for Polish families, socialised into traditional cultural norms, in the context of their lower socio-economic position and Ireland’s market-oriented family policy, structural opportunities and constraints may have a polarising effect. While factors such as cultural and economic capital, or even forced ‘equality of practice’ might facilitate progressiveness in some migrant families, others, trapped within structural constraints, follow a traditional way of doing family.