Meeting the Moral Markers of Success: Concerted Cultivation among Second‐Generation Muslim Parents*
Published online on December 01, 2021
Abstract
["Sociological Forum, Volume 36, Issue 4, Page 1071-1094, December 2021. ", "\nConcerted cultivation describes how parents reproduce middle‐class status by preparing children for success through the organization of their family’s daily lives. Scholarship accounting for the potentially important role that minority religious identity plays in this process is warranted. The current study fills this theoretical and empirical niche by exploring the parenting practices of second‐generation, upper‐middle‐class Muslim Americans. I show how within the context of rising Islamophobia, members of this group defined success for their children using both socioeconomic markers and moral markers, in which Islam and excellent character traits are crucial. With this definition in mind, parents aimed to reproduce both class and religion in the third generation using concerted cultivation strategies. I utilize data from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 72 in‐depth interviews with second‐generation Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans in suburban Metro‐Detroit. I make contributions to sociology by presenting novel data on a little understood minority group and their institutions and by bringing religion into discussions of second‐generation parenting styles and class reproduction.\n"]