Parent‐Child Communication Problems and the Perceived Inadequacies of Chinese Only Children

Abstract

In this article I analyze longitudinal case studies of five Chinese families to account for the tensions underlying widespread Chinese discourses about the unsatisfactory personalities and behaviors of children born under China's one‐child policy. I argue that these tensions result from a mismatch between the simple values of excellence, independence, obedience, caring/sociableness that Chinese parents tell their children to abide by and the more complex, difficult‐to‐conceive, and difficult‐to‐articulate cultural models Chinese parents actually want their children to develop. This dissonance arises for a number of reasons: (1) The values at stake are often mutually contradictory; (2) Parents have difficulty identifying and articulating the situated cultural models they want their children to use to match values to contexts; (3) Children fail to understand and internalize the complex cultural models their parents want them to develop; and (4) Parents' desires to transmit their own cultural models to their children conflict with their desires for children to develop superior cultural models that would enable them to attain upward mobility. Chinese singletons' inability to meet their parents' expectations should thus be seen not merely as a result of the singleton status popular Chinese discourses often blamed for the younger generation's failings but also as a result of their status (shared with many other children worldwide) as rapidly developing children in a rapidly changing world. My findings suggest that studies of cultural models should pay more attention to discrepancies between verbal glosses and the conceptual complexity of the cultural models underlying them, and to the transformations that occur in the process of internalizing and integrating diverse sources of social information.

The importance of English in primary school education in China: perceptions of students

“…The structure of the family has been transformed into a '4-2-1' model; four grandparents, two parents, and one child in each family (Shwalb et al 2003). Within this structure, children in urban areas have become the centre of families and are carefully nurtured by their parents and other family members (Fong 2007 In contrast, there is a different story in rural areas of China. As people in rural areas still largely rely on agriculture, labour is the priority.…”

“…Since the introduction of the 'one-child' policy in the 1980s, the structure of the Chinese family has been changed to a '4-2-1' model (Shwalb et al 2003). Under this model, the single child has become dominant and more important in a family unit, a trend particularly pronounced in urban areas (Fong 2007). In terms of English education, though parents may not have enough knowledge to help their children, there is no doubt that they find alternative ways to assist their children in learning.…”

Psychological Anthropology

“…Semistructured interviews about the topic in question are generally employed, with interviewees' comments then analyzed for repeated patterns in their explicit statements as well as the unstated assumptions that are revealed in the metaphors they use, their reasoning, and their trains of association (see essays in Holland and Quinn, 1987;Quinn, 2005). Cultural models research has been used to study conflicts between contemporary Chinese parents' explicitly stated values and their more complex implicit cultural models of appropriate behavior (Fong, 2007), Americans' ideas about marriage (Quinn, 1996), and Americans' conflicting schemas about social policy issues such as immigration and social welfare programs (Strauss, 2012).…”

Differentiating Ideals versus Practices in the Discussion of Confucian Influences on Chinese Parent–Child Relationships

“…They are psychologically less dependent on their parents than when they were younger, and yet they are not old enough to be expected to take on the duty of caring of senior parents. Consequently, major clashes might be generated between parental expectations for filial piety, or more specifically obedience, and adolescents' interpretation of the cultural models for their own generation (Fong, 2007). Fong (2004) found that Chinese adolescent singletons struggled to define boundaries between respecting parental authority and upholding personal autonomy.…”

“…Take families with adolescent children for example, parents and adolescents tend to value mutual respect, good communication, and warm relationships, without concerning too much about propriety (Wang, 2014). Moreover, ordinary parents in contemporary China cannot and will not expect their children to be dependent upon the family estate, and in fact want their adolescent children to be independent and competitive in the modern economy (Fong, 2007). Therefore, the quality of being conforming and showing deferential demeanor is unlikely to be the central elements in what parents view as filial piety in adolescents.…”