When Welfare State “Integration” Becomes an Intimate Family Affair: Ethnic Minority Parents’ Everyday Orchestration of Their Children’s Future Belonging in Denmark

Abstract

Based on a qualitative interview study, this article focuses on the everyday organization of family life in Denmark among ethnic minority parents with Pakistani, Turkish, Palestinian and Iraqi backgrounds, with a particular view to the quotidian resource management of time and money within intimate parent–child relationships. Through this focus on how the parents prioritize their everyday time and financial resources from an intergenerational perspective, the article explores the motivations and reasoning behind such arrangements of family life—including how they reflect parents’ visions for their children’s future lives. While it applies a time-use and consumption perspective to examine mundane family lives, as opposed to, for instance, a social integration perspective, the analysis nonetheless reveals how Danish policy and public debate on the “integration” of ethnic minorities directly and in detail shapes the quotidian orchestration of family life and its intimate relations. This translates into a highly concrete, everyday concern with and attentiveness towards “integration” among the parents. This attentiveness towards the Danish integration debate haunts the parents’ sense of self. Moreover, I argue that it materializes in routinized family life practices, strongly shaping the innermost private sphere of mundane parental choices regarding the day-to-day management of time and money, and in the everyday strategies for the next generation’s future belonging in Denmark expressed in this management.