Superstrong Danish-Afghan Mothers:Experimenting with Parenting and Authority within Refugee Families

It is often a great challenge to raise your children in the best possible way if you live as a refugee in a new country. Mothers will often be met with a range of advice and guidance, demands and control from, parents, in-laws or their husband, as well as from frontline workers in the welfare state such as health workers, kindergarten educators and schoolteachers. This article discusses how Danish-Afghan mothers experiment with upbringing and authority within the family. Based on Cheryl Mattingly's concept of “moral laboratories” (2014), the article explores how the three women, Nastaran, Aina and Shabana, strive to create good upbringing practices and show a form of interest and care for their children that they themselves may not have been afforded during their own upbringing in Afghanistan. However, experiments always have unpredictable outcomes, just as changes in family norms and practices rarely happen without negotiation and friction – in many cases it requires “superstrong mothers” to implement new ideas and practices.