Abstract
Existing parenting research in sociology is dominated by a class analysis approach, which assumes a strong relationship between family resources and parenting behaviours. This relationship, however, is found to be weak in contexts such as China. In this study, I propose a theoretical model that takes account of parental valuation of children and explore its implications for parenting practices. Using this theoretical model, I analyse data from the 2014 survey of the China Family Panel Study and report the following findings. First, Chinese parents predominantly value a child figure who is “emotionally priceless and educationally achieving”. Second, parents who report higher emotional value and achievement value of their children are also significantly more likely to adopt intensive parenting practices. Last, family socioeconomic resources and parents’ valuation of children are complementary in affecting different dimensions of parenting: whereas family SES is positively correlated with parents’ investment in children’s education, parents’ perceived values of children (particularly the emotional value) exert strong effects on parental involvement in various ways to boost children’s academic performance. I conclude the article by ruminating on the theoretical and policy implications of this study.
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Notes
I excluded 986 observations with care-giver report filled by adult proxies other than parents, whose identities remained vague (a large percentage were likely to be the grandparents, but there was no way to distinguish maternal from paternal grandparents, or grandmothers from grandfathers) and whose answers differed dramatically from parents’ reporting. To produce more accurate estimation, I dropped these cases from the analysis.
In the CFPS design, the set of value of children questions were only asked to parents of children of certain age groups in each wave, but the questions remained consistent across waves. For example, in 2010, only parents of children aged 6, 10 or 14 were asked about this set of questions. Therefore, using the 2014 wave data as the main data and assuming relative stability of people’s value (Schwartz and Bilsky 1987), I retrieved 718 observations with valid value measures from the 2010 wave and 338 observations from the 2012 wave. The final sample comprised 2715 children aged between 6 and 15 (exclusive of those aged 9 and 13) in 2014.
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Gu, X. Parenting for Success: The Value of Children and Intensive Parenting in Post-Reform China. Child Ind Res 14, 555–581 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09746-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09746-4