Intensive parenting and transnational mobility

Intensive parenting is a resource-intensive and child-centred childrearing paradigm common among relatively affluent parents (Faircloth, 2023). Intensive parenting practices take many forms. The literature describes parents giving their children access to resources, such as leisure activities (Mukherjee and Barn, 2021), helpful enrichment programmes (Dhingra, 2020), and well-resourced schools (Ayling, 2019; Hutchings, 2021; Warikoo, 2022) designed to facilitate children’s cultivation of advantageous forms of capital that put them on the path to future success (Espino, 2013; see also Lan, 2018; Bandelj and Spiegel, 2023).

Some parents use transnational mobility to invest in their children’s futures. Lan (2018; 2019) describes how professional parents in Taiwan work to ensure that their children acquire Western cultural capital by enrolling them in international schools, taking them abroad to attend summer camps or visit relatives, and hiring English language tutors. Tu (2022) documents how upper-middle-class families in China enrol their children in private secondary schools in the US, which they believe to be superior to the local schooling options. Molz (2021: 3) highlights how disgruntlement with local, formal schooling options leads some families to become worldschoolers who take ‘their children out of conventional school settings to educate them while travelling the globe’. Through their travels, worldschooling parents strive to raise children who embrace risk and demonstrate self-reliance, creativity and leadership. Collectively, these studies describe how parents use international mobility to facilitate their children’s development of beneficial competencies by providing them with access to what they consider superior resources.

A portion of parents who use transnational mobility to invest in their children’s futures are immigrants who settled abroad but opt to send their children to their country of origin for some length of time. For instance, Lan (2018; 2019) found that a segment of professional Chinese parents settled in the US cultivate their children’s ethnic cultural capital by sending them to summer schools in Taiwan and China. Other studies document how immigrant parents send their children to their country of ethnic origin to receive a more rigorous education (Qureshi, 2014), or to assuage concerns about how racism or lax moral standards in their ‘host’ country may thwart their children’s upward social mobility (Qureshi, 2014; Coe and Shani, 2015). Other studies, such as Guarnizo’s (1997) research on transnationally mobile Dominicans, document how parents send their children to their country of ethnic origin due to the perceived incompatibility between their own cultural identity and the one acquired by their children growing up in the US. In other words, concerns about parent-child acculturation differences (Nieri et al, 2016) drive some parents to send their children to their country of ethnic origin.

Studies show that parents carefully analyse the risks and benefits of different countries to determine where to raise their children. Scholars conceptualise the perspective that transnational migrants develop as their social worlds span multiple countries as a dual frame of reference. According to Guarnizo (1997), citing Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (1995), the term dual frame of reference was traditionally used to describe immigrants’ habit of comparing their life in their ‘host’ country to their experiences within their country of origin. In his study of transnationally mobile Dominicans, Guarnizo (1997: 310) extends our understanding of this concept by demonstrating that after spending time in the US, those who return to the Dominican Republic ‘retain a dual frame of reference, constantly comparing their situation in their “home” society to their situation in the “host” society abroad’. In other words, Guarnizo (1997) demonstrates how transnationally mobile people may use a dual frame of reference in their country of origin, not just their country of migration.

The present study explains how middle- and upper-class return migrant parents use a dual frame of reference to compare the opportunities available to their children in India and the US wherever they live. Parents use a dual frame of reference to consider the present and future benefits that may accrue to their children based on where they live. From this comparison, return migrant parents determine that India represents the best option for them.

Intensive parenting and children’s agency

Recent studies on parenting strategies and social mobility show that children have an active role in these processes. For instance, studies on middle-class parenting practices show how children are encouraged to negotiate with their parents (Lareau, 2011), advocate for access to desired resources like extracurricular activities (Mukherjee, 2023), use the support provided by their parents to attain educational advantages (Calarco, 2014; Hamilton, 2016; Hamilton et al, 2018), and achieve professional success (Lareau, 2015; Hamilton, 2016). These studies focus primarily or exclusively on the role of elementary school-age children (such as Lareau, 2011; Calarco, 2014; Mukherjee, 2023) or young adults (for example, Lareau, 2015; Hamilton, 2016; Hamilton et al, 2018) in family social mobility processes.

Teenagers represent another important age group in discussions about parent-child dynamics in social mobility strategies. For instance, Lareau’s (2011) follow-up study to her ground-breaking research on childrearing practices among the parents of elementary school students shows how middle-class parents continue to play a very active role in their high school-age children’s lives by gathering information for them, helping them sign up for relevant college admissions tests, and otherwise facilitating their transition out of high school (see also, Lareau and Weininger, 2008). Lareau and Weininger (2008: 142) argue that ‘To varying degrees, middle class parents and their children form a collective in which concerted action on the part of each family member is carefully directed toward a shared goal over the course of a child’s high school career.’ In other words, parents and their children form a partnership designed to help them achieve shared goals. Like Lareau and Weininger (2008), I find that return migrant parents and their children form a partnership during high school. In this partnership, parents and their children work together to achieve academic success, commitment to professional goals, and admission to exclusive colleges and universities.

Parenting, class and ethnicity

Much of the work on social mobility strategies analyses how class shapes parenting practices, oftentimes marginalising the role of race and ethnicity in how parents prepare their children for future success. Critiques of the primary focus on class in studies of parenting practices come from scholars such as Alex Manning (2019) who argues that popular parenting paradigms, like Lareau’s (2011) concerted cultivation, fail to account for how race and class work in tandem for minority parents. This failure overlooks how the interplay between race and class shapes parenting logics and impacts children’s understanding and navigation of their social world. In a similar vein, Utsa Mukherjee and Ravinder Barn’s (2021) work refines Lareau’s (2011) conceptualisation of concerted cultivation by documenting how racialised parenting ideologies inform middle-class British Indian parents’ use of leisure activities as tools for ethnic-racial socialisation. Their parenting practices consequently facilitate their children’s development of a positive understanding of their ethnic background and give them a set of skills, such as competencies in Indian languages, designed to help them stand out in the global economy and capitalise on the rise of India. The connection between class mobility strategies and the development of particular understandings about race and ethnicity is reflected in scholarship among other groups as well. For instance, Rebecca Karam (2020) describes how second-generation Muslim American parents facilitate their third-generation children’s development of Muslim American identities as a pathway to achieving upward social mobility.

While previous scholarship describes how pursuing class mobility strategies is intimately connected to ideas about racial and ethnic identity, these studies do not investigate how social mobility strategies impact children. Using data from return migrant families, this study addresses the impact of social mobility strategies on children by examining how moving to India affects their relationship to and understanding of their ethnic identity.

Data and methods

The data for this study come from interviews I completed with middle- and upper-class Indian and first-generation Indian American return migrant parents and their children from 35 different families. The return migrants I interviewed initially moved to the US to pursue higher education and professional opportunities. After spending some time in the country, they returned to India with their families. The children I interviewed for this study range in age from about 14 years old to early twenties. In total, this study includes data from interviews with 54 Indian or first-generation Indian American return migrant parents and 38 adolescents or young adults. I conducted these interviews between June 2015 and January 2018.

I located families to interview through my personal and professional networks. I recruited participants from two schools: the Indian Academy of Scholars (IAS) and the Richmond Academy of Science (the Academy). The IAS is a chain of private, English-medium schools located throughout Bangalore that offers the Central Board of Secondary Education curriculum. It is well known for having a good mix of academic and extracurricular offerings. For this study, I contacted the administration at two branches of IAS – one in the northern suburbs and another in the eastern suburbs. The administration at both campuses connected me to students and/or families who were of Indian ethnicity and had lived in the US prior to moving to Bangalore.

Like IAS, the Academy is a private, English-medium school. Unlike IAS, the Academy offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma. It has a reputation for being one of the best international schools in the city on account of its record of students who score well on the IB exams and gain admission to competitive colleges and universities around the world. The Academy provided me with a list of parents interested in participating in my study. I contacted parents from this list.

Most of the interviews with parents and their high school-age children took place in respondents’ homes and were audio recorded using a digital recording device. In rare instances, I completed interviews with parents in their offices (2) or at a local cafe or restaurant (2). Additionally, in four cases I completed interviews with high school-age return migrant youth outside of their homes. In these cases, I conducted the interview at school (3) or at a local cafe with a parent present (1). In only one instance, a parent requested that I interview their child online using a video-conferencing application.

All the interviews were transcribed and then analysed according to the following themes: (1) the role of India in return migrants’ parenting strategy; (2) youths’ agency in advocating for access to beneficial resources, such as access to competitive high schools; (3) the effects of return migration on children’s engagement with their ethnic identity. I then connected the empirical evidence to the literature on parenting, social reproduction, childhood and ethnic identity. To maintain their confidentiality, I gave each participant a pseudonym. I also did not use identifying details, such as a parent’s employer, when discussing the findings.

Creating geographies of possibility

Because the family can take trips to other parts of the world, aside from India and the US, Saraswati believes that her children ‘will adapt better, globally’. Being exposed to people from other countries and learning how to relate to them in meaningful ways are important skills that will help them navigate the world as adults.

Another option would be for Nalin to engage in the same activities with his father in Bangalore, rather than going abroad.

Nalin’s plans fit well within the social mobility strategy his father, Divesh, has for him. When I spoke with Divesh, he mentioned that Nalin has travelled to many different countries with him. Divesh says, ‘So, I like the idea of taking him to different countries. Whenever I go to any country I start discussing – I love business opportunities.’ Taking Nalin on international trips where they discuss business opportunities is important to Divesh. He shared, ‘I want my kids to think of the world as their playground in terms of economic opportunities […].’ Divesh wants Nalin (and his other children) to have the skills needed to take advantage of the economic opportunities available around the world. Therefore, Nalin’s plan to work for his father after high school complements the aspirations Divesh has for his future.

In addition to seeing the advantages of exposing their children to life in India and international travel, parents also believe that their children would benefit from the rigorous primary and secondary education available at some of the leading schools in Bangalore that can facilitate future transnational mobility. Riya, a mother of two, learned the value of education from her own parents. Riya grew up as the daughter of two government employees – her father worked as a mechanical engineer and her mother was a teacher before becoming a school principal. During the interview, she told me how they fostered her professional achievement and financial independence by educating her in a private school, even though it was financially difficult for them to do so, and encouraging her to pursue a career different from their own. Their support led her to complete an undergraduate degree in engineering. After college, she landed her first job at one of India’s largest information technology (IT) companies. Two years after graduating college, she moved to the US for work.

Riya’s reflections on her upbringing led her to question the type of education she and her husband were providing for their children in the US. She noticed how some of her Indian friends’ children were unable to reproduce their parents’ level of achievement. She also deeply empathised with the concerns of her ethnic Russian and Czech friends who felt that the middle and high school education available to their children ‘doesn’t really push your kid as much to excel and go to college and be an achiever’. She also witnessed her friends having to supplement their children’s relatively paltry homework assignments during middle school and high school. She shared, ‘They ended up getting books and teaching their kids on their own.’ Seeing her friends work to provide their children with a quality education led Riya and her husband to critically question the type of education they were providing their own children. With these concerns in mind, Riya and her husband relocated their family to Bangalore.

Not only did Riya want her children to have access to a rigorous education – something that she did not find in the communities she lived in within the US – she also wanted them to be educated in a school that would keep them on a path to pursuing a college degree in the US (or Europe). Thus, the decision she made for her children about their education kept open future transnational mobility pathways.

Parents also describe the comfort they felt raising their children in an environment that reflects and supports the values they want to inculcate in them. For example, Matthew, a father of two, lived in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, before moving to Bangalore. In Bangalore, he enrolled both of his children at the Academy. He describes his children as benefitting from the culture of hard work present within their community. He claimed: ‘And I think that is a peer pressure here [in India], which is making kids here also strive, because I can’t look at my younger child’s friends and say, “That guy is a slob.”’ He contrasts his younger son with his nephews in the US who he describes as squandering their ‘good genes and good brains’. About his nephews, Matthew said, ‘They just want to walk through life, get a bachelor’s degree, somehow get a degree. There’s no sense of excellence.’ Matthew believes that his nephews’ lack of drive is the result of growing up in the relatively lax and permissive environment they are exposed to in the US.

Matthew shared that it would be hard for him to raise his own children in such an environment. Matthew grew up in a middle-class family in Kerala, a state in south India. He had no real intentions of moving to the US but did so after high school in the mid-1980s. He relayed: ‘And when I went to the United States it was like manna from heaven – this land of opportunity that I had.’ After arriving in the US, Matthew earned his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree, and became a certified public accountant (CPA) by the age of 21 before starting a lucrative career as a management consultant. Matthew clearly values hard work and the importance of living life intensely and intentionally. He likes raising his children in an environment that supports these values and his desire to instil those characteristics in his children. He described receiving support for his parenting goals from the other parents who educated their children at the Academy and from the school itself, which sent graduates to competitive colleges, like Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago.

Using a dual frame of reference (Guarnizo, 1997), return migrant parents determine that India provides their children with more opportunities to cultivate the skills and competencies needed to live and work in different countries. For instance, living in India not only opens the subcontinent as a space for their children to live and work in the future, but it also frees up parents’ resources to travel internationally and, consequently, expose their children to other countries and cultures. Akin to the worldschooling families studied by Molz (2021: 52) who believe ‘that travel is inherently educational’, the parents I interviewed see the benefit of travel to their children’s future. By giving their children the skills needed to be transnationally mobile adults, return migrant parents enable them to use geographic mobility to secure their upward social mobility (Schuerkens, 2005; Berg, 2015; Yemini et al, 2019). They believe that raising their children in India will benefit them through familiarity with life in India, increased international travel, access to academically rigorous and competitive schools, and greater exposure to the values needed for future success.

Partners in privilege: selecting the right high school

As Riya’s example shows, choosing the right school is an important decision. Return migrant parents make this decision with input from their children. Parents and their adolescent children form a partnership to select the best high school and achieve success once there. While the parents I interviewed ultimately had the final say in where they would enrol their children in high school (grades 9 through 12) – a choice that was dictated by cost, curriculum, and where they envisioned their children attending college (for a discussion of school choice among return migrant families see Atterberry, 2021; 2022) – the adolescents I interviewed had a firm say in the matter as well.

One family, the Tayals, engaged in multiple international moves to ensure their oldest son received an education best suited to his talents. Sandeep and Champa Tayal, parents of two from Bihar, a state in east India, lived in North Carolina and New Jersey before relocating to Bangalore. They initially enrolled their eldest son, Pratap, in a competitive school in Bangalore that emphasised doing well in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects like biology and chemistry. While they really liked the school, they came to realise that it was not a good fit for Pratap who was more inclined to what he was learning through a local dramatic arts extracurricular programme. To find a more suitable school, the Tayals decided to leave India and temporarily relocate to Los Gatos, a city in northern California, on the advice of one of Champa’s college friends. Sandeep and Champa liked the schools in Los Gatos because they had great academic offerings paired with plentiful extracurricular activities. They purposely avoided some school districts because of their reputation for having schools with hyper-competitive environments, like what they found in India. Whereas Riya, discussed earlier, left the US because of concerns about the quality of the education available in her local area, the Tayals moved to the US in hopes that they would find a school that had a more relaxed academic environment and great extracurricular activities that would support their son’s interest in the arts.

The Tayals’ decision to enrol Pratap in high school in Los Gatos paid off. Within his first year at the school, he was selected for a key role in a theatre production, he was nominated to help produce the school’s newsletter, and he joined the badminton team. Most importantly, he was putting a lot of effort into his schoolwork and doing very well academically – making straight As. This success contrasted with his experience in Bangalore, where no matter how hard Pratap worked, the highest grade he earned was a B.

When the family initially moved to California, they planned to stay for Pratap’s last three years of high school and then move back to Bangalore after he started college. However, their plans changed because Champa had a difficult time readjusting to life in the US. After several conversations as a family, they ultimately decided that Champa, Pratap, and Pratap’s younger brother would return to Bangalore, while Sandeep would stay in the US for at least one more year to pursue a new job opportunity. Importantly, Pratap had strict requirements about his schooling that needed to be met before he would agree to relocate. After doing some research, he told his parents that he would be willing to return to Bangalore only if he got accepted to the Richmond Academy of Science. According to his parents, Pratap liked the Academy because he had friends who either already attended the school or planned to join for 11th grade. Therefore, he would already have a social network to rely on. Meanwhile, Sandeep and Champa liked the Academy because they found that the principal supported Pratap’s relatively unorthodox choice of subjects, such as choosing to take a higher-level theatre course. They felt like the Academy would enable Pratap to build on the progress he made in Los Gatos.

Getting Pratap admitted to the Academy was the family’s goal; however, they developed contingency plans in case this did not work out. The contingency plans included getting Pratap admission to another English-medium international school in the area. In fact, Sandeep had gone so far as to reach out to the admissions office and secure an unofficial acceptance from them. If Pratap was accepted to the Academy but did not like it, his parents planned to engage another back-up plan. This one would involve Pratap relocating to Seattle, Washington, to live with his father and attend a public school there for the remainder of high school. Luckily, Pratap got admitted to his desired school – the Academy – and he liked it.

During his interview, Pratap reflected positively on the experience of temporarily relocating to the US. He shared with me that attending part of high school in Los Gatos enabled him to bolster his interest in films and feel more confident pursuing a career as an artist, a marked change from his earlier professional goal of becoming an engineer. Going to the Academy enabled Pratap to build on the progress he had made in Los Gatos. According to Champa, because of the support provided to him at the Academy, ‘Everywhere, he’s like, shining grades.’

Champa and Sandeep considered leaving Bangalore because of their interpretation of Pratap’s educational needs. After determining that it was feasible to move to the US, they wanted Pratap to be comfortable with the idea too. According to Champa, Pratap researched Los Gatos and discovered that he had friends in the area. After completing this research, he became increasingly excited by the prospect of relocating. The decision to move to Los Gatos resulted in Pratap excelling academically and having increased confidence in himself. This confidence enabled Pratap to advocate for himself when his parents decided to move back to Bangalore – this time, for their own reasons. Pratap’s ability to advocate for himself led to the overall success that they all value: higher grades, more commitment to future career goals and increased happiness. Pratap and his parents worked together to put him on the path to achieving future success. Selecting the right high school was an integral segment of that path.

Parents and their children working together to construct a transnational educational plan for high school was relatively rare among the study’s participants. There were only two other families that considered a transnational high school plan. One family, after learning about their son’s desire to attend college in the US, chose to relocate to Michigan with the hopes that he would secure in-state tuition at a local university. Another family considered sending their daughter to Singapore for the last two years of high school. They ultimately did not do this due to concerns about the impact completing high school in Singapore might have on her chances to study and practise medicine.

Most families only considered high schools in Bangalore. For example, Jamini, a mother of two girls, shared with me how she wanted her oldest daughter, Samiya, to attend a different high school after 10th grade because she ‘felt she should go to some place different and just experience something different’. However, Samiya disagreed with her mother. When I asked Samiya about her choice not to change high schools, she told me, ‘I stayed to run for student body and get that on my resume, so I’d look good for college.’ As she elaborated on her decision to remain at her high school, it was clear that serving on student government was a dream she had had for years, and she felt that it would help her achieve a bigger goal that she shared with her mother: receiving financial aid to attend a reputed college in the US. Receiving financial assistance was critical to Samiya’s ability to attend college outside India because Jamini was a single mum who worked sporadically as a doctor during Samiya’s childhood. Ultimately, Samiya received a scholarship for 75 per cent of the cost of tuition and fees to complete a joint undergraduate degree programme administered by the Paris Institute of Political Science (in Paris, France) and Columbia University (in New York City, US). By advocating for herself and her goals, Samiya worked with her mom to achieve a goal that they both desired.

Most of the families shared stories of relatively effective partnerships that helped their children achieve academic success; however, there were some families that faced significant challenges to their social mobility strategies. These challenges were oftentimes the result of a mismatch between their child’s needs and the school they attended. To navigate through any difficulties, parents and children worked together to determine an appropriate solution. Thus, even in cases when their social mobility strategies do not work according to plan, parents consider adolescents’ opinions to resolve issues that come up.

These findings mirror research done in the US, which documents how parents and their children work together to accomplish shared goals during high school (Lareau and Weininger, 2008; Lareau, 2011). These findings also echo research in China shows how parents actively support their children’s success by buying or renting an apartment close to their children’s school to minimise their commute and create a home environment conducive to studying (Chiang, 2022).

Social mobility projects, ethnic identity and youth

Relocating to India gave Adarsh the opportunity to better connect to the Indian aspects of his identity. When I asked him to elaborate on how growing up in India affected him, he described how having a better connection to his ethnic identity not only enables him to reconcile deep-seated questions about who he is and where he belongs, but also facilitates his ability ‘to move between both places very easily’. His ease with living in the US and India is evident in how he lives his life. During our interview, Adarsh was a student at Fordham University in New York City, with ambitions of going to law school. While he lives most of the year in the US, he still makes frequent visits back to India.

I probed her further about these perceived differences. She elaborated by saying, ‘I mean, we’ve been brought up differently and we’ve had different opportunities and chances and upbringings and access to information.’ Due to her experience growing up in India, Samiya sees herself as different from other second-generation Indian immigrants, like those who return to India in the summers and her cousins who live in the US. For others, such as Zuleika, an aspiring doctor who lived in the US for 12 years before moving to Bangalore, the feeling of being different from second-generation immigrant youth was accompanied by feeling able to relate more closely to first-generation immigrants. Therefore, return migration may result in greater intergenerational continuity as young adults like Adarsh, Samiya and Zuleika see their cultural interests and life chances influenced by their experience living in the subcontinent, which results in them feeling different from second-generation Indian American youth raised only in the US. In other words, raising their children in India, rather than the US, may help return migrant parents mitigate the parent-child acculturation differences (Nieri et al, 2016) that can emerge between first-generation immigrant parents and their second-generation children.

Conclusion

Overall, this study shows how affluent families use international mobility to achieve upward social mobility, the centrality of young people to the success of family social mobility strategies, and the interconnections between social mobility and ethnic identity. For this study, I interviewed middle- and upper-class return migrant parents who have the means to invest intensively in their children’s futures. Using a dual frame of reference (Guarnizo, 1997), parents compare the benefits of raising their children in the US and India. Based on this comparison, these parents conclude that India is the best option. Parents believe that raising their children in India increases the opportunities available to them. By raising their children in India, parents expose them to life in the subcontinent, which subsequently opens India as another place for them to live and work in the future. Living in India also frees up family resources to take trips abroad, enabling parents to familiarise their children with additional countries and cultures. Parents also shared how India has schools capable of preparing their children to attend colleges anywhere in the world – including elite colleges in the US – and how they enjoyed raising them in an environment that further reinforces the values they believe will help their children experience future success.

Return migrants’ children play a significant role in the success of their family’s social mobility strategies. I document how parents and their children work together to select a high school that promotes their academic achievement, fortifies their professional interests, and sets them on the path to a competitive undergraduate institution within or outside India. Consistent with the findings of Lareau (2011) and Lareau and Weininger (2008), I find that parents and their children form a partnership during high school to accomplish shared goals.

As argued by numerous scholars (for example, Armstrong and Hamilton, 2021; Mukherjee and Barn, 2021), parents’ social mobility strategies are closely connected to ideologies about race (Lacy, 2007; Hamilton and Armstrong, 2021) and ethnicity (Karam, 2020). In this study, I demonstrate how transnational youth come to see their cultural interests and life chances as greatly influenced by their time living in India, which is reflected in their perceptions of difference from US-raised second-generation Indian Americans. In this way, relocating to India may reduce parent-child acculturation differences (Nieri et al, 2016) that can emerge between first-generation immigrant parents and their second-generation children.

This study reinforces and extends the extant literature in several ways. First, it supports findings from Luis Guarnizo’s (1997) study on Dominicans, where he argues that transnationally mobile individuals use a dual frame of reference wherever they may live. The return migrant families in this study evaluate the options available to their children in the US and India when they lived as immigrants in the US and after they returned to India. Second, this study on return migrant families in India complements research conducted in the US (for example, Lareau and Weininger, 2008; Lareau, 2011) and China (such as Chiang, 2022) documenting the partnership that forms between children and their parents to accomplish shared goals during high school. Third, this analysis supports the idea that social mobility strategies are connected to understandings of ethnic identity (for a discussion of this see, Karam, 2020; Mukherjee and Barn, 2021). Building on existing research, this study demonstrates how being raised in India leads youth to see their cultural interests, life chances and identities as significantly influenced by their time living in India. In other words, I demonstrate how middle- and upper-class return migrant families can help their children get ahead in a way that affirms their ethnic identity.

Future research should interrogate the conclusions drawn from this study. For instance, while I confirm the existence of a partnership between return migrant parents and their children during high school, I do not investigate how they establish a trusting relationship, determine their shared goals or agree on how to accomplish those goals. Such research would provide a more nuanced understanding of the factors that go into building an intergenerational partnership between parents and their children. Future research should also examine the role country context plays in shaping how parents raise their children and the subsequent impact this has on the messages they pass on to their children related to their ethnic identity. Such research would provide a more comprehensive understanding of the intergenerational transmission of ethnic identity and its connection to family social mobility strategies.

Funding

This work was supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Research Grant.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.