Parenting Between Here and There: Children Separated from Families by Migration and Child Welfare

Separation from families can occur in different ways and impacts people’s well-being and family relations. In today’s world with ongoing war, conflicts, and environmental changes, approximately 110 million people are forcibly displaced. This historically high number of forcibly displaced people in the world leads to families being separated, living transnational lives and creates new challenges for host countries’ asylum politics, reunification laws and welfare services. In this chapter we explore migrant parents’ experiences of separation from their children. We explore two separation contexts that migrant parents may experience. First, we investigate parents being separated from their children due to migration, we explore how parents navigate child rearing in a transnational context; and second, we investigate the experiences of migrant parents living in the same country as their children but separated from their children by the child welfare services. We draw on empirical data collected in two qualitative studies in the Norwegian context to argue that separation from families must be understood multidimensionally and one in which what is considered nationally/publically to be the ideal family is insufficient for understanding or addressing the needs of the migrant families. We discuss multifaceted aspects of separation and reunification from migrant parents’ perspectives, which impacts strategies that may be employed by the host country to maintain/rebuild family relationships when children are separated from their migrant birth parents. Our findings suggest that separations and reunification have an impact on the family’s well-being, and parents perceive a lack of acceptance and acknowledgement of the hardships related to not being viewed as the ideal family in the Norwegian context. Furthermore, while these two kinds of separation may seem different, some find that there are connections between these two that make parenting experiences even harder.