Parenting Beliefs under Revision - Dynamics and Change in Turkish-German Migrant Parents’ Ideas about Child Rearing and Development in Early Childhood

Discourses in educational science and politics in Germany regularly ask for parent education programs for migrants in order to enhance their parenting competencies while implicitly questioning the ability of these parents to prepare their children for the demands of school and society adequately because of their presumed inadequate parenting practices and beliefs. Especially Turkish-German migrants are assumed to cause socialization deficits among their children because of their unreflected maintenance of traditional Turkish parenting beliefs. Simultaneously, parenting beliefs of Turkish-German parents have rarely been studied - especially not in their complexity, dynamics and changes. Parenting beliefs, conceptualized as complex cognitive belief systems, comprise beliefs on children’s nature and development, assumptions about children’s needs, socialization goals, beliefs on the influenceability of developmental processes and effectiveness of certain parenting practices. Parental belief systems emerge as a result of an individual’s socialization process and simultaneously reflect cultural beliefs. In our cross-cultural and cross-national research we studied parenting beliefs of 120 mothers and fathers of preschoolers in Germany and Turkey employing qualitative interviews. We aimed to differentiate parenting beliefs along culture, gender, educational background, and migration experience. The present presentation relates to analyses of interviews with 40 Turkish-German parents in Germany. The results illustrate, how Turkish-German parents cope with parenting beliefs and practices in a reflexive, conscious and adaptive way. They report of changes in their beliefs because of growing experiences with being a parent. That means, an experience- and situation-based adaptation of parenting beliefs takes part. Parents observe their children, try to find out their needs and what is adequate for their wellbeing and positive development when coping with ideas and strategies about how to react in certain situations. But they also see migration-related, economical, individual, familial determinants and constraints of parenting which hinders them to be the parent they would like to be.