Stalled repaternalization in educational care: Negotiating paternal authority in reunited immigrant families

This study examines how paternal authority and competence are reshaped when Pakistani migrant families in Italy transition from long-distance caregiving to co-residence, focusing on educational responsibilities within a demanding host-country school system. Drawing on 28 dyadic semi-structured interviews with mothers and fathers from 14 recently reunified families in Naples, we analyzed how linguistic and institutional barriers affect fathers’ attempts to re-establish traditional roles. Findings show that fathers face a significant linguistic–institutional lag, resulting in repeated “brokerage failures” in crucial domains like homework and parent–teacher communication. Mothers, having established functional authority during the separation period, retain educational dominance and shoulder additional cognitive and emotional labor as fathers attempt to participate. This crisis of paternal competence often prompts compensatory disciplinary behaviors, while children gravitate toward the institutionally fluent parent, reinforcing a domain-specific split in parental authority. Theoretically, the study shows that transnationally differentiated parental roles become unequally valued when they encounter the host-country institutional field: institutional brokerage converts some parental resources into recognised educational competence more readily than others, producing a paternal competence crisis and subsequent reallocation of authority. We conceptualize this as the transnational conversion of paternal authority, showing why physical reunification does not necessarily produce equivalent functional authority.