Abstract
Confucian heritage culture holds that a good education is the path to upward social mobility as well as the road to realizing an individual’s fullest potential in life. In both China and Chinese diasporic communities around the world, education is of utmost importance and is central to childrearing in the family. In this paper, we address one of the most serious resettlement issues that new Chinese immigrants face—children’s education. We examine how receiving contexts matter for parenting, what immigrant parents do to promote their children’s education, and what enables parenting strategies to yield expected outcomes. Our analysis is based mainly on data collected from face-to-face interviews and participant observations in Chinese immigrant communities in Los Angeles and New York in the United States and in Singapore. We find that, despite different contexts of reception, new Chinese immigrant parents hold similar views and expectations on children’s education, are equally concerned about achievement outcomes, and tend to adopt overbearing parenting strategies. We also find that, while the Chinese way of parenting is severely contested in the processes of migration and adaptation, the success in promoting children’s educational excellence involves not only the right set of culturally specific strategies but also tangible support from host-society institutions and familial and ethnic social networks. We discuss implications and unintended consequences of overbearing parenting.
Highlights
Confucian heritage culture values education and holds that a good education is the path to upward social mobility as well as the road to realizing an individual’s fullest potential in life (Lam et al 2002).In both China and Chinese diasporic communities around the world, education is of utmost importance and is central to childrearing in the family
As educational success is highly valued by the society and educational attainment along with school performance scores are key to getting into good universities or good jobs, new Chinese immigrant parents align their education practices and strategies with the institutional environment, just like the majority of native Singaporean parents
If new Chinese immigrant parents in the U.S rely on ethnic institutions and social support networks in the broader Chinese immigrant community to promote their children’s education, their counterparts in Singapore address the challenges of increasingly competitive education and its related problems primarily through strong individual human capital, which is associated with economic resources and cultural and social capital
Summary
Confucian heritage culture values education and holds that a good education is the path to upward social mobility as well as the road to realizing an individual’s fullest potential in life (Lam et al 2002). Research has consistently shown that children of new Chinese immigrants, or xinyimin, generally do better in school than their native peers, as measured by GPA, grades, college attendance, and college graduation institutions, in countries such as the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore (Abada et al 2008; Archer and Francis 2006; Chung et al 1997; Ho 2017; Kasinitz et al 2009; Lee and Zhou 2015; Seah 2017; Sue and Okazaki 1990; Watkins et al 2017) Their extraordinary academic success is often attributed to Confucian heritage culture or “tiger mom” parenting, the traditional Chinese way of childrearing of a strict and disciplinarian mother (Chua 2011; Chua and Rubenfeld 2014). We conclude by discussing unintended consequences of over-bearing parenting
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