Schools, capital, and the perpetuation of advantage: the case of return migrant families in India

• In Event: Intensive Parenting Across Cultures: Global Varieties in Mobilizing Cultural Capital

Abstract

Annette Lareau’s (2011) seminal work on parenting among middle-class, working-class, and poor Black and White families in the US has fundamentally shaped how we understand the interplay between social class, parenting, and children’s outcomes. Building upon her intellectual contributions, scholars such as Pawan Dhingra (2020), Pallavi Banerjee (2022), and Utsa Mukherjee and Ravinder Barn (2021) have theorized about parenting practices among middle-class members of the Indian diaspora in the US (Banerjee, 2022; Dhingra, 2019), and the UK (Mukherjee & Barn, 2021). My research contributes to this body of work by focusing on the parenting practices of upper- and middle-class Indian return migrants living in Bengaluru, a city in South India. These are parents who lived in the US before returning to their country of origin (India) with their family. These parents are unique in that they have lived a lifestyle that has required them to make multiple international motives as adults. Anticipating that their children will lead similarly transnationally mobile lives, they actively work to inculcate them with advantageous forms of embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) that will help them lead successful lives as transnationally mobile adults.
Choosing an appropriate school for their children is an integral part of preparing them for the future. School choice does not happen in a vacuum. Parents’ considerations about their own schooling experiences (Gurney, 2017) and their children’s future college prospects (see Shankar, 2025), inform where parents educate their children. Importantly, schools in India exist as part of a hierarchy that differentiates schooling options based on curriculum, medium of instruction, and cost of attendance (LaDousa 2007, 2014). As a result of this hierarchy, affluent parents – like the ones included in this study – can access more, better quality schooling options. I argue that this means that affluent parents can more easily maximize their children’s educational experience by moving them from one school to another. To better explore school switching among affluent return migrant parents, this study addresses the following questions: What motivates parents’ decisions to move their children from one school to another? How do parents perceive school-switching as benefiting their children?
I address these questions by analyzing interview data collected from parents from 35 return migrant families living in Bengaluru. I identify roughly half of the parents in my sample as school switchers. Parents from 17 families changed their child’s school at least once to bring the school’s curricular and extracurricular opportunities in line with their children’s college goals and their professional interests. Parents in the remaining families are school stayers. Like school switchers, many school stayers considered alternative schooling options for their children but decided that their initial school choice would best facilitate their children’s long-term goals. These findings demonstrate how school choice remains the purview of the socially privileged and highlight how school choice remains an important site for interrogating the intergenerational transmission of privilege, and the reproduction of social inequality.

Author

• Adrienne L. Atterberry, University of Massachusetts - Lowell