My parents never spent time with me!’ Migrant parents in Italy and 'competent parenting

Mothers who migrated from Morocco and Ecuador to northeast Italy are the subject for this article, which explores the way in which they observe Italian parenting and tend to negatively evaluate the care they received at home. They consider their settlement in Italy as an opportunity to acquire a “modern” style of parenting. They also access websites and books to seek advice on how to parent, mixing home-country and settlement-country sources of information. They do not perceive any contradiction between these different sources of information, which are considered “science,” and therefore as culture free. The article shows how parenting advice is more than just scientific or “cultural”: It is imbued with hegemonic political discourses. The appropriation of the hegemonic parenting discourses is, indeed, far from deterministic, being riddled with resistances and ambiguities. Through the dynamic entanglements of normative constraints and new resources offered by multiple parenting models, mothers contribute to the renegotiation of the terms of local, transnational, and global citizenship.