A contribution from Anja Treichel and Siphilisiwe Ndlovu
Bundeselternnetzwerk der Migrantenorganisationen für Bildung und Teilhabe (bbt)
Draft – June 2025
This article builds on our earlier reflections on internet addiction among migrant youth. There, we looked at what happens when screens become a child’s escape from the offline world and discussed the phenomenon of parentification, when children take over parents’ tasks and therefore lose their childhood. Now, we turn our attention to a related but often invisible pressure: What happens when that same screen becomes a doorway for bias, bullying, and silence? We shift from the individual to the institutional, from coping to collective care, and from isolation to new kinds of shared boundaries that hold, not hurt. It explores how immigrant parents in Germany experience two particularly charged issues: limiting screen time and bullying. Drawing on cultural theory, social research, and lived experience, it questions the assumptions behind well-meaning parenting advice and calls for a broader, more inclusive understanding of what parenting means in a migration society.
Table of Contents
Part I: Digital Challenges and Institutional Responsibility
- Introduction: “It was just a joke” until it shows up online
- Screen Time: Hours vs. Exposure
- From Playground to Phone: Mapping the Bullying Pipeline
- Setting Boundaries Is Not Just a Family Task
- Giving Voice: Tools for Families to Speak and Be Heard
- Building Shared Agency: Empowering Kids Without Isolating Them
- Continuity and Follow-Up: Making Boundaries Last
- From Scattered Apps to Coherent Support Systems
- From Parents in Isolation to Co-Learning Communities
- From Lines That Hurt to Lines That Hold
Part II: Reframing Parenting Norms in a Migration Society
- From Complexity to Context – Why ‘Setting Boundaries’ Isn’t So Simple
- Parenting in the Context of Migration
- What Is Culture, Anyway?
- Cultural Dimensions and Parenting
- The Power of Framing and Generational Influence
- Conclusion: Boundaries Are Not One-Size-Fits-All
- Toward a More Inclusive Parenting Discourse
Part I: Digital Challenges and Institutional Responsibility
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Introduction: “It was just a joke” until it shows up online:
In the past, an insult on the playground might have ended with detention. Now, it follows children home, lives in their pockets, and sometimes reappears years later as a meme. In our work across migrant communities in Germany, we’ve seen how racial, religious, and cultural bullying rarely stops at the schoolyard – on the contrary, the schoolyard is a fertile breeding ground for it. It mutates. It spreads through chat threads, gaming servers, and WhatsApp groups and then returns to the classroom, more charged than before.
How do you draw fair, realistic boundaries when the harm doesn’t stop at the school gate? What does it take for a teacher to respond with care, not just punishment? And how do migrant families, often juggling three languages, rotating shifts, and little institutional trust, step in early enough to protect their children without cutting them off from their peers and making them feel excluded?
- Screen Time: Hours vs. Exposure:
The 2022 KIM study shows that 70% of children in Germany use the internet, with rates increasing sharply with age. By age 10–11, more than half own a smartphone. However, two-thirds of parents report not using parental controls or filters. Immigrant parents may face additional barriers: limited digital literacy, lack of information in their language, or uncertainty about what constitutes “normal” screen time.
For many immigrant families, phones are lifelines. Children translate bus routes, send voice notes to cousins in Syria or Ghana, and upload photos of their Eid or Orthodox Christmas celebrations to group chats, but in the same chats, they are told their food smells. Or their skin is dirty. Or their headscarf looks like a napkin.
According to the 2024 RKI report, 48% of migrant children in Germany report experiencing bias-based bullying in person, and 35% online but these are not two different numbers. They’re often the same insult, just traveling between spaces. A slur shouted in the hallway becomes a screenshot. A teasing nickname becomes a TikTok comment.
These difficulties are often compounded in households with multiple generations. Grandparents may not understand the appeal of screens or may use them to soothe children, unaware of educational or behavioral consequences. In multigenerational homes, boundaries are constantly negotiated, often unspokenly, across generational lines. Parents are often told to “limit screen time” to reduce risk, but limiting hours doesn’t limit harm when group chats continue after curfew. Instead, we suggest anchoring phone-free moments to cultural or spiritual rituals: Friday dinners, post-prayer stillness, moments of rest. Let rules feel like collective care, not punishment. Create cool-off windows after school, and frame them as a shared pause: “We’re pausing because this space has too much noise.”
For many migrant families, a simple rule like “no phones after eight” isn’t simple at all. It’s not just about discipline, it’s about connection. A device turned off might mean missing the only daily call from a father in another country. Or ignoring a cousin’s voice note that reminds a child where they come from and who still remembers their name. So, what does a boundary look like when it doesn’t cut, but holds? It starts with recognizing what’s at stake. Not just screen time, but identity. Not just safety but belonging. Boundaries don’t have to isolate. They can gather. They can protect without controlling. They can feel like an inside joke, a ritual, a shared pause that everyone understands, not because someone printed it in a flyer, but because the family wrote it together. What if screen time guidance started from the truth that, for some children, the online world is the only place they are fully seen, called by their real name, spoken to in the language they still dream in?
Not all boundaries are walls. Some are scaffolding, made to hold us up when the world outside doesn’t.
- From Playground to Phone: Mapping the Bullying Pipeline:
A fight in the hallway. A whisper during PE. A teasing remark about lunch. These don’t just stay put. They travel. Playground taunts become WhatsApp group jokes. A peer records a tantrum, then posts it with mocking music. Girls wearing hijab are filmed secretly and edited into anti-Muslim memes. Cyberbullying moves with harm and many schools still treat online and offline bullying as unrelated: a digital problem for IT, a schoolyard problem for the teacher.
We need to track these transitions. Schools can make reporting forms multilingual and visual, accessible through QR codes or posters. Encourage students to report patterns, not just incidents. Pair online and offline records. If bullying is reported in class, check digital spaces. For teachers, the shift must be from reactive to systemic: ask, where did this start and where did it land?
For parents, it means validating a child’s online hurt without making them feel like they caused it by “being on their phone.” What if teachers treated every racist meme in a chat group as seriously as if it were scrawled on the whiteboard?
When children face bullying, parents’ responses range from “toughen up” to “I will protect you from everything.” Both extremes are rooted in experience. Some parents survived bullying themselves and see it as a rite of passage. Others, having experienced racism, fear for their children’s emotional safety and try to control their environment.
But bullying today, especially in digital spaces, is not what it once was. The permanence of online content, the public nature of shaming, and the anonymity of perpetrators create a new landscape of threat. Many immigrant parents are unfamiliar with these dynamics and are left with few tools, linguistic, cultural, or institutional, to respond. They often don’t know where to turn, or what their children are actually going through.
Schools and kindergartens, again, play a crucial role here. Are anti-bullying policies culturally sensitive? Are teachers trained to recognize when a child is being targeted not only for their behavior but for their name, their skin color, their religion? Parents need allies, not gatekeepers. Institutions must move from seeing bullying as a private, family issue to a systemic one with structural roots.
Effective responses begin with understanding. What is bullying? What is discrimination? What rights do children and parents have? Without this knowledge, which is not always available in multiple languages, parents cannot advocate effectively. Empowering children starts with empowering parents.
- Setting Boundaries Is Not Just a Family Task:
Much of the advice migrant families receive is framed as “tips”: Monitor your child. Limit screen time. Set boundaries. Attend workshops. Do your job, but many of these assume time, trust, and language comfort that not all families have. In our bbt workshops, parents tell us: “I didn’t understand the school invite.” “The last time I reported something, nothing happened.” “My child begged me not to say anything because they feel embarrassed that I don’t speak the language so well.”
Boundaries cannot be enforced by overwhelmed parents alone. Schools must offer translated guidelines; not just assume they’re understood. Teachers should be trained to spot cultural triggers and bias patterns. Communities can create co-learning spaces where teens and parents explore privacy settings, story sharing, and peer protection together. A migrant parent working two shifts cannot patrol every group chat, but a school that tracks bullying patterns and intervenes early can prevent the worst. What if the real question wasn’t “Why didn’t parents act sooner?” but “What systems failed to act with them?”
- Giving Voice: Tools for Families to Speak and Be Heard:
Silence is the soil where bias grows, but silence isn’t just fear, it’s often lack of tools. What does a child say when someone calls them a slur in a Minecraft chat? How does a parent raise concerns if they don’t know the German word for “bullying” or “group chat”?We need tools that make voice possible. Phrase cards in key languages like Kiswahili, Arabic, or Romanian. Visual apps like ClassDojo that let kids report feelings without needing words. Storytelling circles where children act out real conflicts and co-create peaceful scripts. Words build protection. Without them, a parent’s silence might be misread as indifference. What if language access were seen as essential as Wi-Fi in every school program?
- Building Shared Agency: Empowering Kids Without Isolating Them:
“Just log off” is not a solution when the chat group is your friend circle, and “just block them” doesn’t work when you sit next to them in class. Children need tools that protect without disconnecting. Let students form digital buddy systems pairing up to spot harmful content and report it. Train peer mediators to defuse tension. Use creative workshops like meme remixing or slam poetry to turn insult into insight.When kids feel agency, not guilt, they stop hiding problems and start helping solve them. What if every school had student-led response teams for digital harm the way it does for fire drills?
- Continuity and Follow-Up: Making Boundaries Last:
A single meeting is not enough. Parents attend an anti-bullying session then hear nothing for six months. Children report a racist comment then see no consequence. Protection must be predictable. Set quarterly check-ins with families. Share anonymized outcomes, “Three chats reported, one resolved through apology.” Build digital behavior into everyday school culture, not just emergencies. Consistency signals care. What if follow-up´s were seen as the core of protection, not the extra?
- From Scattered Apps to Coherent Support Systems:
Each new problem seems to come with a new app. Parents are told to check Moodle for homework, Iserv for messages, yet another app for lunch, and another still for safety alerts. Meanwhile, kids are juggling Discord, TikTok, WhatsApp, and PlayStation chat all at once. This fragmentation hides patterns and overwhelms families. Schools may think they’ve “digitally modernized,” but for many migrant parents, the digital landscape feels like a maze without a map. Let’s bundle platforms. One dashboard, one login. Offer onboarding sessions in home languages, not just PDF guides. Train student or volunteer tech mentors who can support families in real time. Digital cohesion is not a luxury it’s the ground beneath trust. What if every school saw digital clarity not as an extra but as part of safeguarding?
- From Parents in Isolation to Co-Learning Communities:
Too often, families feel alone: either left out of digital decisions or blamed when things go wrong. But isolation is not inevitable it’s designed. It happens when schools rely solely on written communication, schedule parent evenings during shift hours, or treat “digital responsibility” like common sense instead of a learnable skill. We need co-learning spaces. Host tech cafés where parents and teens build skills side by side, not lectures, but labs. Celebrate plural expertise: let a grandmother who’s mastered WhatsApp teach a teacher about privacy settings. Belonging begins when participation is real. What if digital citizenship started by seeing parents not as problems but as potential?
- From Lines That Hurt to Lines That Hold:
Some rules silence. Others protect. The difference is not in the intention but in the implementation. A “no phones after 8 pm” rule can feel like exile if it cuts off a child’s only connection to cousins abroad. But the same rule, practiced as a ritual, shared and adjusted, can create space for storytelling not shame.Involve kids in rule setting. Ask them what boundaries feel safe. Explain the “why,” not just the “what.” Revisit them often because growing up requires growth in rules too. Children don’t need perfect systems. They need held spaces. What if every rule started with the question: What are we protecting and who gets to decide?
Part II: Reframing Parenting Norms in a Migration Society
- From Complexity to Context – Why ‘Setting Boundaries’ Isn’t So Simple:
In the first part, we provided an overview of the topics of “setting boundaries” and “bullying” from the perspective of immigrant parents. We listed many examples to illustrate how complex seemingly simple everyday decisions can be and what aspects, for example in transnational families make it harder for parents to set clear boundaries. We hope this offered a glimpse into the realities of migrant families’ lives that may help educators, policymakers, or even parents themselves understand what migrant families are facing and where awareness is still lacking especially when all the challenges young people face are blamed on parents’ “incompetence” or lack of engagement.
We feel we haven’t yet emphasized enough how deeply parenting practices are shaped by culture, and how rare it is to find universally applicable parenting norms or styles that can be imposed on all families.
That’s why in the following chapters, we take a closer look at the concept of the cultural embeddedness of parenting (including family cultures) and its implications for ideas like “setting boundaries.”
- Parenting in the Context of Migration:
Parenting is never isolated from context. The way children are raised depends not only on individual choices but also on social conditions: income, housing, trauma, education, and culture that is socialization. Migration deeply affects parenting in ways that we are only beginning to understand. As Leyendecker et al. (2018) notes, “Much of the research on how migration impacts parenting is still at its infancy and what is available is primarily informed by research based on North-American populations.”
Moreover, the category “migration background” alone does not adequately describe the diverse realities of immigrant families. Socioeconomic status, level of education, and legal status all shape how families experience parenting in a new country. Yet despite this diversity, certain cross-cutting challenges can be identified—especially for newly arrived families: unfamiliarity with the education system, lack of community ties, and the struggle to preserve family cohesion while adapting to new norms.
- What Is Culture, Anyway?
To understand parenting differences, we must start with culture. Hofstede (1993) defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group from another.” Other definitions describe culture as fluid and changing. By “culture” we don’t describe “national culture” or “religious culture”, we don’t ascribe fixed and unchangeable traits to groups of people which would be discriminatory and essentialist. Culture is never tied solely to ethnicity, nationality or language it exists in subcultures, families, generations, and more.
Everyone carries multiple cultures. Culture is created by people and shapes people in return. Reducing individuals to static cultural traits often leads to stereotyping, while denying culture as an influence ignores the deep ways it informs communication, values, judgments and the way we behave and think. For instance, when we feel irritated by someone else’s behavior, it is often because they have violated a norm we unconsciously hold.
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Cultural Dimensions and Parenting
Hofstede and Trompenaars developed models that outline various culturally learned cognitive and behavioral dimensions that serve to make human behavior comparable and analyzable in its cultural embeddedness. Both models offer valuable tools for understanding cultural differences. Hofstede’s model is more quantitative and nation-based, while Trompenaars’ approach includes qualitative aspects and subcultures. These dimensions are often used to analyze conflicts in transnational teams and to offer solutions that move beyond the categories of “right” and “wrong” by operating with the idea of “difference.” The goal is also to recognize the cultural embeddedness of one’s own behavior and not to only attribute culture to others while denying it in oneself.
Cultural dimensions show tendencies and help people reflect on someone’s behavior but they don’t describe individuals.
Hofstede’s theory remains valuable for practical conflict reflection but does not provide a universal solution. The complexity, hybridity, and modern identities—especially in transnational contexts—are only partially captured. The use of national boundaries has also been criticized. Nonetheless, these dimensions are insightful because they move us away from the assumption that our own values are universally correct and others’ behavior is “wrong” for not adhering to them.
These dimensions clearly influence parenting behavior, particularly in preferred parenting styles and goals.
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The Power of Framing and Generational Influence
Values, shaped by culture, influence how parenting is framed and perceived. We tend to attribute positive values to our own behavior and negative ones to others, depending on the underlying norms. One parent may see themselves as “protective,” while others label them “overprotective.” Many (immigrant) parents consciously reject authoritarian models they grew up with. Yet without role models for non-violent parenting, they struggle. How do you enforce rules without punishment? How do you pass on life experience without sounding controlling.
Parenting becomes more complex when influences collide. A grandparent may allow screen time that a parent restricts. A single parent working long hours may have limited capacity for supervision. Cultural expectations about decision-making authority—between parents, elders, or institutions—often clash.
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Boundaries Are Not One-Size-Fits-All
The directive to “set boundaries” sounds deceptively simple. In reality, it rests on a web of cultural, social, and emotional assumptions. For immigrant families, parenting involves navigating multiple worlds at once. Before we advise, we must listen.
Ultimately, if we wish to foster a society that takes all its children seriously, we must also take all forms of parenting seriously, not only those that match dominant expectations. That means making room for doubt, for difference, and for the insight that the boundary between “good” and “bad” parenting is often drawn by those least affected by its consequences. We must recognize that there are many ways to approach challenges in parenting.
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Toward a More Inclusive Parenting Discourse
Parenting advice in Germany often centers middle-class norms, but most parenting challenges are systemic: crowded housing, limited access to daycare, lack of translation support, social stigma. Immigrant parents need support that is empathetic, structurally informed, and culturally responsive.
At the same time, public and political discourse tends to reduce immigrant parenting to a question of deficit and dysfunction. Headlines frame parents as either too authoritarian or too permissive – sometimes both. Policy documents emphasize integration through language acquisition and school attendance, but rarely consider what institutional changes are needed to include immigrant perspectives.
And what about the schools and kindergartens? How much space do they make for intercultural dialogue with parents? How many resources go into truly understanding the different parenting norms and lived experiences migrant families bring? Too often, institutions see themselves as neutral, while parents are viewed as the problem—too passive, too controlling, too uninvolved, too permissive.
This discourse shapes expectations and subtly dictates what “good parenting” looks like. When immigrant families don’t match these expectations, they are pathologized instead of understood. The narrative becomes one of correction and control, rather than dialogue and mutual learning.
The media plays a crucial role. Parents with a migration background are often portrayed in simplistic ways: either as passive victims or as cultural threats. Nuanced portrayals of everyday parenting under precarious conditions are rare. This shapes public opinion and affects how schools and welfare agencies interact with families. That’s why we decided to give them their “voice choice” back.
Language in politics matters. Terms like “bildungsferne Schichten” (educationally distant social groups) or “Integrationsverweigerer” (groups that distinctively reject integration) reinforce negative stereotypes and obscure structural challenges. These narratives isolate migrant parents and erode institutional trust.
Meanwhile, initiatives to “empower” parents often operate within narrow frameworks. Without recognizing bilingualism, transnational ties, or trauma histories, they miss the mark. True empowerment requires recognition and a willingness to adapt institutions, not just families.
Importantly, many parenting resources in migrant families are informal: extended family, religious groups, neighborhood ties. These are rarely acknowledged by institutions but are central to children’s development. Inclusive parenting discourse would build bridges between these networks and public services, rather than forcing families to choose.
To change this, journalism and policy must see migrant families as creative, resilient agents navigating multiple worlds. Listening means seeing beyond deficits. It means embracing complexity, contradictions, and the emotional labor of parenting under pressure.
Successful programs combine child education with family support, promote positive parenting, and foster resilience through stable relationships. Investing in parents is investing in children. And listening to migrant parents’ voices is not a luxury—it is a necessity.
References
Hurrelmann, K., & Richter, M. (Eds.). (2022). KIM Studie 2022. Medienpädagogischer Forschungsverbund Südwest.
Robert Koch Institut. (2024). Traditional Bullying and Cyberbullying at Schools in Germany – HBSC Focus Report 1/2024. Berlin: RKI.
Leyendecker, B., Agache, A., & Aydin, H. (2018). Parenting in a New Land: Immigrant Families in Germany. European Psychologist, 23(1), 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000311
Migration Policy Institute. (2016). Engaging Immigrant Parents in Schools: Strategies from Five Districts. Washington, DC: MPI.
OECD. (2022). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): Learning in Context. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/4d467ea5-en
Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hampden-Turner, C., & Trompenaars, F. (2004). Riding the Waves of Culture (3rd ed.). Nicholas Brealey International.
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