Paper short abstract:

Exploring how psychotherapeutic approaches play into child welfare work with migrant families in Norway, I argue a tension between the culturally specific, but universal social qualities as opposed to disembedding approaches in child welfare, redoing experiences of the social personhood and self.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how psychotherapeutic approaches play into child welfare casework with migrant minority families in Norway. Based on in-depth interviews with parents and child welfare workers, and inspired by phenomenological analysis, the paper examines the narrations as they speak of distinctions between the socially particular and universal, and the undoing and redoing of the social in child welfare practices. Justifying the decisions in child welfare work, the child is no longer foremost expected to be valued as an investment for future social benefit, but more for their own agentive being in the here and now, and recognized with human rights. In accordance, parents are less expected to exercise parental authority but to take responsibility in securing what is held to be in the ‘best interest of the child’. Here, the attention is turned towards how parents interpret and act in relation to the child’s signals and thus redo the social into relations that support attachment and emotional regulation. Holding on to such psychotherapeutic ideas and images of a universal ‘normal family’ and ‘healthy child’, I suggest, contribute to many migrant minority families’ perceptions of the child welfare to “discriminate”, “steal our children” and stimulate emigration to prevent the children from becoming “too Norwegian” or to “strengthen own religious or cultural identity”. Such reactions, I propose, reflect experiences of unbelonging and tensions between the culturally specific, but universally human qualities of sociality, as opposed to the disembedding approaches in child welfare, redoing experiences of the social personhood and self.