Contesting parenting expertise: Constructing good mothering and searching for dignity in Cameroonian Berlin

Parenting is socially constructed via interpersonal encounters, experiences, and narratives circulated among parenting interlocutors who act simultaneously as experts in and audiences for parenting practices. This contribution addresses the changing and contested nature of parenting expertise in Cameroonian Berlin, exploring how kin, friends, and pedagogical, social service, and medical personnel construct contrasting views of what “good” parenting is and whose expertise counts. Immigrant mothers who arrived in the early 2000s developed expertise and then became community-based experts, advising subsequent immigrants on how to manage officials who hold power to define good parenting in the German context, to praise or insult migrant mothers, and even to remove custody rights. The content and sources of parenting advice, its modes of transmission, and its audiences have changed over the past quarter-century in response to the increasing size and heterogeneity of the Cameroonian diasporic community, and new technologies for communicating advice. Immigrant mothers’ parenting advice remains focused on biomedical care, emotional regulation, and academic readiness, aimed at producing middle-class selves and achieving dignity and respect in an environment that so often denigrates Black women “foreigners” and their German-born children. Women who develop a reputation for mothering expertise undergo self-realization, crucial in Cameroonian immigrants’ search for dignity.