In the eighth installment of our blog series on 'Childhood and Migration,' Jessica Schwittek (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany) and Karin Kämpfe (University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany) examine what belonging means for children in the context of migration.
Mahir's drawing on what "good arrival" means to him, as discussed below.
What does “belonging” mean? We tend to think of it as something felt by individuals. Examples include belonging to a family, to a group of peers or friends, to a neighborhood, or to a country. A sense of belonging therefore arises through connection with people and places. It arises through the interactions, experiences, intimacy, mutual recognition and mutual obligations associated with particular people and places, as well as the time spent with them.
In this blog, we draw on two research projects dealing with both childhood and migration. In the first project, children with a refugee background were interviewed about their experiences of "arrival" in Germany. The second project addresses the increasing plurality of childhoods in migration societies of Germany, France, and the Netherlands from children’s perspectives. In both these projects, the theme of belonging emerged as particularly relevant for our young participants. In this contribution, we aim to illustrate the complexity of what belonging means for children and how it is established or spoiled in the context of children’s migration.
Acculturation can be stressful, especially when prior experiences do not align with new ones, or when competing cultural influences act simultaneously. One of the participants in our first project, a girl named Naime, describes this in relation to differences between schools in Germany and in her country of origin, Kosovo:
Well, I come from Kosovo. And it's completely different to Kosovo. Because in Kosovo, we only have half-day lessons. And here there's more at school. But in Kosovo we spend more time with friends. We go out together and have more fun. Here, free time is about going to courses, like dance courses or ball games. And it's completely different when, for example, the first month here, so it was very difficult for me here.
In Naime's case, the normative expectations of organized and institutionalized childhood in the Western, post-industrial society of Germany diverge from the experience of childhood in her country of origin, where children do not spend as much of their leisure time in pedagogically supervised spaces (such as extra-curricular courses).
Although Naime retrospectively describes her new surroundings as difficult, she appears to have also found a way to deal with the challenges of adapting to them. While acculturation has long been viewed unilaterally in terms of the conflict and crisis it may cause, with children often being depicted passively as torn “between two worlds”, attention is increasingly shifting towards their active constructions of multifarious belonging and hybrid identities. The children’s connections and identifications are thereby fluid and dynamic. The following sequence from a group discussions in the Netherlands (in our second project) illustrates how children negotiate multiple senses of belonging, using language-related identifications as an example, across various (national) contexts:
Rajesh: It's important how one speaks their own language. […] When you go to your own country and someone asks you, "How are you?" then you become quiet, then you don't know what to say. […] Yeah, okay, so when you go to your own country, then you can talk to other people and you can communicate. When you speak Dutch and you forget your own language.
Ruslan: Then people can also speak English. So, you might as well speak English.
Lisa: My father always says that too, you'd better learn your own language, but I don't know either. My uncle says: Dutch is important since you live in the Netherlands.
Rajesh: That's true again.
The sequence refers to children’s differentiated (self-)positioning – here in relation to their linguistic actions. They position themselves as transnational actors who master the cultural and linguistic codes of different localities to which they feel they (should) belong.
The evolution of a feeling of belonging also depends on a person’s social environment and the opportunities available to connect with places and other people. Therefore, power relations within migration societies may foster exclusionary dynamics of othering and racism that affect children’s sense of belonging. In our second project, Melina and Tal, participants of a group discussion in France, discussed the impact of such racism:
Melina: Our parents come from different countries, and we have their skin color. We are almost, well, we resemble them, we do everything like them, and it's not our fault if there are people who mistreat us just because of that. And that's not good because then a child will feel bad, it will say to itself that it must return to its country and that -
Tal: - nobody likes it.
Thus, these children describe two competing dynamics. On the one hand, they position themselves as equal, and they feel belonging to the French society. On the other hand, they also experience being denied equality and belonging by the majority group.
We would like to conclude by pointing to the necessity of creating opportunities for such children and thereby raise sensitivity for the social structures which may either enhance – or hinder – their sense of connection and (multifarious) belonging. Spaces for peer encounters are of particular importance for newly arrived children. This is also reflected in the drawings produced by our participants in the first project on the topic of “good arrival”. Mahir’s drawing, for example (shown at the top right of this page), depicts a newly arrived child teaching her new friend how to do a handstand.
The word “Schule” (German for “school”) in the drawing represents an important site for new friendships to form. Thus, school offers a space for children to interact with peers, to make new experiences together, and potentially develop a sense of belonging. Schools as well as other educational institutions should actively make use of this potential to foster processes of children’s social integration. Given the complexity of belonging processes in migration contexts, our findings point to the importance of supporting children’s connections and identifications during the arrival phase. This, however, is also true for children in later stages of (family) migration. They, too, should be able to feel like integral members of society, treated equally, and not have to fear facing racism. In all these respects, processes of belonging are not solely a matter of the individual migrant child but, rather, of the broader (local, national, and transnational) social contexts within which children grow up.