Abstract
This paper sets out to examine the type of help, from parents to children and among siblings, in order to understand the educational involvement and strategies of large immigrant families. The first point consist in asking whether parental involvement is the same for all the children regardless of their birth rank and gender, the second point is about the help from siblings which remains a neglected dimension in the researches on family involvement in education. We used the “Trajectories and Origins” statistical survey and 42 follow-up interviews. We focus on children of immigrants from working classes who were either born in metropolitan France or who arrived there before age seven. Aged between 25 and 40 in 2008, the respondents had at least one immigrant parent from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, sub-Saharan Africa or Turkey; and a large majority has at least two siblings. The article highlights that parents invest more on eldest children in immigrant families as well as in French-origin ones; yet contrary to French-origin parents, immigrant parents from North Africa invest on their daughter’s school career even more than in their sons’ one. Siblings’ help is especially important in immigrant families; they manage to compensate, at least partially, for the lack of parental help in school matters.
Highlights
This paper sets out to examine the type of help, from parents to children and among siblings, in order to understand the educational involvement and strategies of large immigrant families
Article Research based on panels of students who started secondary school in 1989 and 1995 constructed by the French Education Ministry’s Department of Evaluation, Prospective Research and Performance (DEPP) (Vallet and Caille, 1996; Brinbaum and Kieffer, 2009) found that, on average, children of immigrants had lower academic performance, a higher dropout rate, and were more frequently put into the least prestigious secondaryschool tracks
When social class and family background were controlled for, the same studies demonstrated that children of immigrants outperformed their French-origin peers at secondary school
Summary
These disparities can be attributed to several factors, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The seventh of nine children (the two eldest children have different mothers: one died and the other has almost always lived in Algeria), was helped and influenced a lot by her elder sister (her parents’ eldest daughter): “She supervised our homework and managed dealings with officialdom (...) Halim’s mother was able to supervise his homework (and explain lessons to her children) in primary school, but once he started secondary school, his elder siblings took over: “the older ones helped the younger ones” according to their abilities: “Abdel (the eldest brother) with maths, Samia (the eldest sister) with spelling (...).” (Halim, 34-H-36-Algeria, the fifth of six children).
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