Parental involvement and educational success in Kosovar families in Switzerland

Rosita Fibbi,Jasmine Truong

doi:10.1186/s40878-015-0010-y

Abstract

While some children of immigrants experience intergenerational upward social mobility, others do not. This paper explores the impact of parental and family involvement on offspring trajectories by contrasting families whose children experienced a highly mobile path, achieving tertiary education, against families whose children experienced low or no educational mobility. Focusing on within-group differences, the qualitative study analyses interviews conducted with twenty young persons and one of their parents in Kosovar families in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2013. Findings from our dyadic data reveal that educational outcomes are not only associated with parental educational attainment in the country of origin but also with professional mobility in the country of destination. This association is mediated by parenting styles, involvement and practices. While all parents show an important emotional involvement in their children’s educational trajectory, significant within-group differences in the Albanian-speaking group appear with respect to their parenting styles, parental school involvement and resource mobilisation. We show that educational success is associated with an authoritative parenting style practised by parents of different educational background. By contrast, lack of educational success is common in families where parents cannot provide secure guidance to their children, whatever their previous educational achievement.

Highlights

Ten years after its constitution, the Federal Commission for Foreigners published its first report on the “so-called second generation of foreigners” (CFE 1980), a document which marks the entry of this theme in the Swiss public arena
In this paper we focus on part of the ‘new’ second generation in Switzerland, children of Kosovar immigrants who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s (Fibbi, Topgül, Ugrina and Wanner, 2015 )
We find no evidence for a specific parenting style in Kosovar families: the established typology of parenting styles can account for all the immigrant families in our sample

Summary

Introduction

Ten years after its constitution, the Federal Commission for Foreigners published its first report on the “so-called second generation of foreigners” (CFE 1980), a document which marks the entry of this theme in the Swiss public arena. In the wake of the oil crisis in the 1970s, immigration to Switzerland decreased, but immigration flows soon recovered with newly recruited workers arriving in the 1980s and 1990s. They came predominantly from Portugal, Turkey and Yugoslavia (Wanner, Efionayi, and Fibbi, 2009) and occupied similar positions in the labour market than the Southern Europeans did earlier. Fibbi and Truong Comparative Migration Studies (2015) 3:13 recruitment regime, one for EU-EFTA1 citizens and one for third country nationals. This polarisation appears in the integration policy and public debates

Results

Discussion

Conclusion