This volume examines the ways in which bordering practices influence the everyday lives of racialized parents in the changing welfare states of Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Focusing on the need to negotiate, adjust, and reconcile family life, parenthood and parenting practices in the face of national, material, ideological, cultural, religious, and moral borders, it considers the manner in which these processes are complicated by recent changes in the legitimation of Nordic welfare states. The case studies centre on migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker parents, as well as parents of the indigenous Sámi communities. The book considers the ways in which the welfare state and its services construct borders of respectable parenthood, and examines the efforts on the part of racialized parents to negotiate such borders and organize their transnational everyday lives. Uncovering possibilities and obstacles that exist for families seeking to enact citizenship in the Nordic welfare states, Family Life in Transition will appeal to social scientists with interests in the sociology of the family, children, parenting, and the welfare state.

Johanna Hiitola is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Tampere University, Finland.

Kati Turtiainen is Senior Lecturer at the Kokkola University Consortium Chydenius, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and the author of Possibilities of Trust and Recognition between Refugees and Authorities: Resettlement as a Part of Durable Solutions of Forced Migration.

Sabine Gruber is Lecturer in Social Work at Linköping University, Sweden.

Marja Tiilikainen is Senior Researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland and co-editor of Wellbeing of Transnational Muslim Families: Marriage, Law and Gender.