Retrospective Parenting and Relational Resilience Among Black Caribbean British Young People

Introduction

Parenting significantly influences children's education, employment, and intergenerational mobility. While previous research focused on daily parenting activities, this article shifts attention to the specific narratives employed by Black Caribbean parents to protect their children and support their future opportunities. These narratives, drawn from personal, family, and community pasts, aim to equip children with the motivation and resilience needed to overcome life challenges, including discrimination. This approach is defined as retrospective parenting.

Ethnic minority groups, including Black Caribbeans in Britain, have shown a trend towards raised educational and occupational aspirations and upward social mobility. However, despite increased access to professional and managerial positions, their chances of moving into these higher occupational categories remain low compared to white British individuals. Additionally, the educational attainment of Black Caribbean pupils is still significantly below the national average, and their employment prospects are challenging, with a higher unemployment rate compared to white individuals. These statistics highlight the persistent disadvantages faced by Black Caribbeans in education and the labor market.

This article explores parenting, focusing on cultural-specific practices and their link with resilience and intergenerational transmission of aspirations and attainment. It presents the methodological approach and introduces the concept of retrospective parenting, describing its characteristics and its link with relational resilience.

Parenting and Resilience

Parenting is defined as the process of intergenerational transmission, where parents pass on values and beliefs to the next generation using available resources. This process encompasses various aspects, including parenting styles, practices, and resources. The focus is on narratives used by parents to promote better opportunities for their children, considering potential future barriers. These narratives relate to ethnic and racial socialization, accounting for the families' class contexts.

Parenting affects children's development and outcomes through the transmission of social and emotional competencies, self-confidence, mental health, educational achievement, and future life chances. 'Family practice' emphasizes the 'active doing' and 'everyday' aspects of parenting, reproducing relationships within which activities are carried out and derive meaning. 'Family practices' help understand how people 'do' family, conceptualizing parenting as the body of processes and activities behind intergenerational transmission.

In Bourdieu's terms, 'practice' embodies the social structure. Annette Lareau highlights the effects of class in parenting practices, suggesting a split between middle-class and working-class parents. Middle-class parents employ concerted cultivation, cultivating children's talents through organized leisure, while working-class parents use a 'natural growth' approach, focusing on primary needs. However, recent research challenges this class division, highlighting the diversity of parenting experiences within both middle-class and working-class families.

Race and ethnicity play an important role in parenting practices within the same social class. While Lareau concluded that class outweighs race in childrearing, Rollock et al. found that race remains present for almost all parents, irrespective of class status. Middle-class parenting in Black British families revolves around concerted cultivation in a racialized context. These differences may be related to the focus of the studies, with Lareau examining everyday practices and Rollock et al. exploring families’ interactions with institutional settings where racism is more likely to take place.

Theories of ‘ethnic and racial socialization’ (ERS) are relevant, highlighting their potential to be a protective developmental process preparing children to develop a positive racial self-concept and cope with racism and discrimination. In African American families, racial socialization is a ‘primary vehicle of cultural transmission’ drawing on ‘a tradition of resistance to oppression’ and embedded in conversations communicating how to survive with dignity and pride in a racist world. ERS involves transmitting ‘information, perspectives, and values relating to race and ethnicity to their children’, including messages about discrimination, ethnic pride, heritage, and diversity, and warnings about intergroup relations. These aspects of ERS influence children’s attitudes, socio-emotional development, and educational outcomes.

Parenting supports children in building resilience, enabling positive outcomes even in the face of adversity. Resilience is understood as a situated feature resulting from interactions with context and relationships with significant others. Parenting may help develop ‘intrinsic resilient capacities’ to cope with adversities. Relational resilience suggests that individual responses to uncontrollable life challenges signify the relational foundations of agency, with the self relying on intimate bonds.

Aspirations

Ethnic minority groups' high educational and professional aspirations often originate from their migrant past, incentivizing upward occupational mobility through education for the next generation. Longitudinal data analysis reveals that pupils' educational aspirations, parents' aspirations, and pupils' academic self-concept significantly impact educational attainment. The association between high aspirations and later attainment is well established, even after controlling for social background and academic ability. Young people's aspirations, goals, and life plans are a potential protective factor, enabling positive adaptation in the face of adversity.

While aspirations are widely recognized as a driving force, their effects on actual life chances are debated. Length of residence in the host country is associated with declining aspirations and feelings of blocked opportunities. Educational and occupational aspirations also vary by social class, with achievements bound to structural factors, ethnic penalties, and institutional racism. Racial discrimination can reduce the positive effects of high aspirations, negatively affecting educational achievement and schooling experiences. The link between aspirations, educational attainment, and employment outcomes is contested, with aspirations acting as possible rather than tangible predictors of future life outcomes.

Approaches, Methods, and Reflexivity

An intergenerational and narrative approach was adopted to explore interlinkages, continuity, and change in the views and experiences of parents and children. 'Narrative' refers to respondents' accounts of their past or present experiences and how they made sense of them. Narratives are processes of creating meaning in relation to specific social contexts and normative grounds. 'Intergenerational' indicates the focus on what and how has been passed from parents to children. The research design and analysis draw on the interplay between the accounts of parents and teenage children within the same family group.

During interviews, parents and children were asked similar questions about their experiences of growing up, their families, their education, and their aspirations. They were also asked questions about each other. The analysis initially explored themes for all fathers, all mothers, all teenagers, and all parents, then focused on comparing themes across generations in each family group to develop family case studies.

The research draws on eight in-depth family case studies with Black Caribbean families, including 24 single participants. Parents were a mix of first- and second-generation immigrants, while all teenage children were born in the UK. The sample includes three lone parent families. The sampling rationale was purposive, and most of the recruitment was done via snowballing.

The socio-economic backgrounds of the families ranged from the lower middle class to working class. Families were categorized using the National Statistics Socio-economic classification SOC2010, integrated with notions of economic, cultural, and social capital. The main part of the interview aimed to generate narratives about experiences within education and was unstructured, while the final session explored aspirations and upbringing practices from both parents’ and children’s perspectives. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and the researcher took fieldwork notes.

Narratives exist and acquire meaning through interactions between narrators and the audience. Narration and storytelling are co-constructed between the interviewer and interviewee. The implications of a white European female researcher accessing the studied communities as an outsider were taken into account. Evidence of the persistent disadvantage experienced by minority groups and theories about their subordinate positions in society influenced the conceptualization of resilience as an aspect of the relational self that emerges socially.

Retrospective Parenting: Your Past Makes You Who You Are

'Retrospective parenting' explains how parents have used narratives about the past as resources for their parenting. Thomas's family introduces the concept of retrospective parenting from an intergenerational perspective. Thomas's idea that the ‘past makes you who you are’ reflects the essence of retrospective parenting, setting out the importance of the past for the construction of adult and gender identities. Retrospective parenting may involve various levels of the past, reaching to wider family histories and the history of the community, including the diaspora and Black history.

Thomas's familial past was used to make sense of his upbringing and his parenting. The past was not depicted as neutral, but rather, the emphasis was on the difficulties, the challenges, and the struggles that it involved. Thomas's son, Jahil, suggested the importance of having a purpose while negotiating present and future aspirations. Thomas and his wife Rita wanted their children to have a clear idea of what to do with their lives. As parents who had children at a young age, their narratives reflected a sense of missed opportunities and unfulfilled aspirations. Their son Jahil's perceived duty to succeed had been shaped by his parents and particularly his father’s sense of a lack of achievement.

Jahil’s reference to his parents’ earnings as a marker of family status and achievements also reflected a ‘materialistic approach to success’, mirroring his father. His mother spoke about this needing control over his shopping habits, as he tended to buy things they did not really need, such as ‘big new speakers or a huge flat-screen TV’. Having had their first child when they were really young increased the pace of their coming of age, leaving a feeling of needing to catch up with what they had left behind to prioritize their children. Intergenerational analysis sheds light on the implications of the parents’ biographies on their children.

Their daughter Jayla had her own view about her parents’ past life experiences. She actually sounded judgmental about their general lack of self-focus and purpose, describing them as ‘floating around’. Nonetheless, she also showed awareness of why they had had to put their lives on hold. Jayla’s awareness that her parents’ life opportunities had been shaped by having her when they were still very young, affected her own identity. She reflected on her determinant role, although unchosen, in shaping the history of her family and portrayed herself as a mature and self-reliant young woman who was ‘parenting her own parents’.

Thomas and Rita’s family introduces important themes about retrospective parenting, including the importance of different levels of past for parenting and of past as a ‘struggle’.

Looking Inside Retrospective Parenting: Restorative, Progressive, and Preventive Practices

Retrospective parenting takes three main forms: restorative (making up for missed opportunities), preventive (preparing for experiences of bias and discrimination), and progressive (focusing on the future to avoid ‘wrong turns’). These aspects converge towards the idea that the use of the past in parenting has implications for children's present and future. Kwane attempted to compensate for his missed opportunities by ensuring that his children would not have to go through the same hardships. Kwane highlighted the importance of connecting past with future achievements, suggesting that a positive current identity can only be achieved through knowledge of how individual and collective pasts come together.

Lydia enjoyed exploring London with her daughter as a way to ‘re-live her past’ and fill ‘the gaps’ in her own growing up. Although Lydia re-living her past was an inward-looking strategy, it had outer implications, such as providing her daughter with important life experiences. The idea of a ‘migration effect’ was an important feature of the restorative aspect, connecting the migrant’s past with hopes for the future, informed by strong beliefs in meritocracy. Parents hoped that hard work would ultimately be rewarded, reflecting a ‘belief in agency’ and the individuals’ responsibility for shaping their own future.

Emphasis on the past did not mean lack of attention to the future, and retrospective parenting also had a strong forward-looking aspect. These progressive aspects were present in the ways parents encouraged their children to develop self-belief. Aspirations were central in this forward-looking aspect, and parents suggested the importance of instilling aspirations from a young age, so that children grow up with a certain mindset and a focus.

A preventive approach in using the past involved emphasis on the idea of struggle that was used to describe families’ histories and individual biographies. By referring to past adversities, parents sought to raise their children’s awareness about possible bias and to teach them how to overcome it. Hence, preparing children for the possibility of experiencing bias acted as a ‘preventive’ and protective mechanism. Some mothers and fathers raised their children’s awareness of bias by speaking about it directly.

More often, as part of a preventive approach, parents included prejudice and racial discrimination into their narratives about struggles, which characterized their personal past, and that of the family and the community. Many parents spoke about growing up in poverty or at least struggling financially. There was no blame of their families, and most adult respondents used the words ‘hard-working’ to describe their own parents. Even those from a more wealthy and educated background back in the Caribbean described their families’ struggles to maintain their status and social position once in Britain.

The struggles varied by gender and family role: fathers, similarly to some lone mothers, described giving up personal aspirations to provide financially for the family. The struggles of mothers in the couple families were also about giving up things for themselves, like career and education, but they were perceived differently: rather as required to fulfill their childrearing responsibilities.

Another aspect of ‘struggles’ involved wider and shared cultural identities beyond the family. Cynthia was studying to become a teacher and spoke extensively about how she was using ‘black history’ to teach her children about their identity, legacy, and heritage beyond what they currently learn at school. Her son showed that the message had been successfully passed on. Roy's words suggest that the history of these communities fed into the struggles that characterized preventive aspects of retrospective parenting.

Together with the narratives about the past, there were more practical aspects of upbringing that intersected with retrospective parenting. Parents employed concerted cultivation to bring together progressive and preventive elements. Concerted cultivation provided further scope to equip children with the ability to challenge future difficulties with a positive frame of mind. However, our sample was not as polarised by class, and most of our participants were from lower middle-class and working-class backgrounds; they were neither experiencing the most extreme disadvantage, nor they were from the highest professional status. Within these socio-economic backgrounds, we found that most parents were adopting concerted cultivation, rather than natural growth, as a way to both improve the children’s future prospects and train them to tackle difficulties and possible disadvantages.

Alyssa’s Family: Struggles, Education, and ‘Relational Resilience’

Intergenerational analysis suggests that the restorative, progressive, and preventive elements of the past converged with parents' attempts to pass on a sense of resilience to their children. In our case, resilience was not simply an individual attribute. Indeed, parents constructed a sense of resilience as a relational feature whose sources and strengths emerged as part of their biographies, and also the wider family and more general issues affecting their communities.

The importance of resilience was evident in the context of education: even those who spoke about their educational successes used the language of struggle. Lydia's family was among the wealthiest in the sample. Lydia was a ‘straight A’ student who graduated in humanities, but her account of the transition from GCSE to upper secondary was still rather dramatic: Lydia’s walking away as an act of resilience acquires a symbolic meaning: it was not just her response to institutional racism but also a turning point and the beginning of her journey, which ended with her educational success. It was through this initial experience of racism that she constructed her resilient adult identity. While exploring what brought her to leave the room, Lydia made references to her upbringing.

Her husband Ross had a difficult relationship with his stepfather and no contact with his biological father. He spoke extensively about the difficulties of growing up, even though he only opened up explicitly in one of the later visits. Ross’ manifestation of resilience was a survival strategy and reaction against a challenging social environment where he grew up. Lydia and Ross’s resiliencies informed the accounts about the education and future of their daughter Alyssa. Hence, she manifested resilience by imagining her future success, which she perceived as the best ‘revenge’ against the people who were making it difficult for her at school.

Conclusion

Black Caribbean parents have used significant stories from their individual, family, and community past to support the development and transmission of aspirations to their teenage children. Parenting in these families was ‘retrospective’, making references to biographies, family history, and the wider history of African-Caribbean communities to promote future life chances. The use of the past was not neutral, but parents employed it for restorative, progressive, and preventive purposes informed by past and present difficulties and struggles. The resilience promoted by our participants was an expression of agency, which has to be understood as relational, sustained through sources beyond the individual, such as their wider social relations and collective histories. Our results highlight a contradictory mixture of hopes for a better future and concern about children experiencing difficulties and barriers. In this context, relational resilience served as a further attempt to deal with the sense of fatalism and pre-determination associated with the awareness of structured and racialised opportunities.