Becoming a Recognisable Parent: Parental Voice, Migrant Positioning and the Politics of Belonging in Norwegian ECEC

This article examines how differently positioned migrant parents gain unequal access to voice, trust and participation in parent–ECEC collaboration in Norway. Rather than understanding parental engagement primarily as a matter of parents’ willingness or interest, the article analyses how engagement is shaped by institutional expectations and by the forms of communication, trust and participation that ECEC staff recognise as legitimate. This article draws on selected material from a broader qualitative project, including interviews with refugee parents, professional interviews and focus groups with ECEC professionals, and fieldwork in four ECECs. It also includes a newly analysed interview with an American migrant father, used as a contrast to the refugee-parent material. The analysis is conducted as a theoretically informed, abductive and reflexive thematic analysis through the lens of the politics of belonging. The findings identify four forms of positioning: guarded belonging, confident belonging, normative belonging and bounded participation. The analysis shows that migrant parents are not positioned as one group. Rather, their possibilities of being recognised as legitimate co-educators are shaped by language, institutional familiarity, trust, cultural recognisability and staff expectations of “the good parent”. The article contributes to parental engagement research by showing that equitable parent–ECEC partnerships require more than formal opportunities for involvement. They require institutional conditions in which different parental voices are heard as sources of legitimate knowledge about children’s education, care, and belonging.