ABSTRACT
This chapter understands welfare states as normative projects; expressions of moral conceptions, values, and social goals. These norms are learned when growing up in a country, in this case in Finland, and are carried along when emigrating. When living and parenting outside Finland, migrants process and merge the norms from past and present societies. We analyse understandings and representations of good parenthood, and especially those of good mothering as presented by Finns living outside Finland. The data consists of blog texts published by mothers living in Denmark, France, Holland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. We use representation as our analytical concept, and the analysis reveals three main themes of representations of mothering. The first theme, parenthood on the societal level, reveals the frictions and similarities regarding the expectations parents face when encountering services, such as schools. The second theme concerns the parental decisions that consist of the multiplicity of issues that parents need to decide in relation to their children, and includes the sources of information and how different pieces of information are weighed in relation to each other. The third theme addresses the division of labour, and offers representations of the gendered division of labour within families.
