Family Life in Transition

In 1975, the Danish Education Act specified that the school shall fulfil its goals by functioning in collaboration with the parents. This institutionalized collaboration was intended to democratize the school. Over the past four decades, however, school–home collaboration has taken a disciplining and controlling turn with far-reaching effects into the private sphere of family life (Knudsen, 2010). Kees Van der Wolf (2013) points to the risks of professional support for good parenting, where parenting can become both a problem and a preventive tool. If parenting is performed inadequately, children may not get the full advantage out of schooling, whereas if parents perform respectable parenting, their children are more likely to succeed. This risk seems to be even glaringly evident for racialized non-Western migrant families (Dahlstedt and Lozic, 2017; Padovan-Özdemir and Moldenhawer, 2016).