Poverty, defined not only as a significant lack of economical capital but consequently as the restriction of the scope of action of individuals and their families, is a reality for many families within Europe. Poverty can be acknowledged as a multi-dimensional concept which includes the idea of vulnerability. That means that the precarious circumstances faced by families living in poverty have significant effects on their possibilities to participate in society. ‘To be (called) poor’ can challenge and affect families in multiple ways. Within Europe we can find both similarities and huge differences regarding not only the different levels of (relative) poverty between countries and the different living circumstances these levels refer to but also in the challenges the families face, the experiences they have and the different debates in which these issues are addressed.

Therefore the central question of the symposium will be: In which ways do these challenges, experiences and discourses materialise under different circumstances? The analysis will be focused on parents and debates about ‘poor families’, their ‘parenting methods’, as well as on children and their process of growing up. The broad topic of ‘families in poverty’ will therefore be discussed from different theoretical backgrounds and will highlight different aspects regarding discourses and experiences. By doing so, we want to open up a broader look on how families and family relations are shaped in modern societies and how these are challenged by poverty, taking perspectives from and on families into account.

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In recent years it has become common in some East and Central European countries that people migrate to more well-off countries to find a better income. Often these people are parents, who leave their children back home with their grandparents, close family friends or all alone. According to ISCWeB Study funded by the Jacobs Foundation, 22% of twelve years old children in Estonia have experienced one or both parents’ absence from their daily lives due to parent(s) transnational commuting between home and job. The Survey revealed lower wellbeing level among children who had experienced parental job migration compared to those without this experience. The presentation will discuss the transnational job migration of parents as a familial poverty alleviation strategy in terms of costs paid with wellbeing of children and ‘good’ parenting. The presentation will draw data from a small-scale study about children’s attitudes concerning the transnational job migration of parents, from qualitative interviews with children left them behind by both job-migrating parents, and fathers who commute transnationally between job and home. The presentation will demonstrate how transnational job migration can revive traditional family roles and activate children to save family wholeness.

Looking at field experience as well as at media shows it can be observed that being called ‘poor’ for those families are concerned seems to be more of an imposition then a descriptive or critical analysis of their living conditions. In fact most people try to defend themselves against the addressing as ‘the poor’. The paper is based on a discourse analytic study which analyzed how pedagogical-scientific journals speak about ‘poor parents’. Starting with its results it asks how the addressing as ‘poor’ can be understood, why it is maybe dangerous for families to be (called) ‘poor’ and what this means for a perspective on ‘families in poverty”.

The paper is based on an empirical study that includes narrative-biographical interviews with people in a state of poverty. The central question is: What does it mean to people and their construction of subjectivity when they live in poverty? The empirical data shows that parents see their ability to be responsible parents questioned. They are constantly confronted with the need to prove themselves as ‘good parents’. For these parents, poverty is an obstacle from fulfilling their own normative beliefs about ‘good parenting’. This results in emotions of shame, which are a constant attack on their subjectivity.