Parental Beliefs and Their Relation to the Parental Practices of Immigrant Chinese Americans and European Americans

Abstract

In this chapter we investigate the extent to which immigrant Chinese and European Americans endorse different types of parental behaviors, involving control and responsiveness/support, and how such practices are influenced by their cultural belief systems and parenting goals. The parenting practices of Asian immigrants, particularly their parental control strategies, may differ from the control strategies of European American parents due to the different cultural scripts or parental belief systems that inform their practices. Thus, this study is intended to capture cultural distinctions regarding parental practices, as well as parental goals or belief systems. Specifically, in this study, parental control practices will include a more culturally relevant type of control—that of guan—as well as standard measures for behavioral control and responsiveness, based on the Child-rearing Practices Behavioral Inventory (CRPBI) by Schludermann and Schludermann (1988). Two approaches were undertaken in this study for demonstrating whether each parenting concept has cultural meaning or relevance for Chinese American and European American families. The first focuses on the endorsement (i.e., frequency levels) of a particular parental belief system or a set of goals across the two ethnic groups. This endorsement reflects the salience of one particular parenting concept over another for Chinese Americans and European Americans. Specifically, we expect Chinese Americans to endorse parental goals related to Confucian values more than European Americans, and endorse goals for child-centered values less than European Americans. We also expect that Chinese Americans will endorse parental control (that is, behavioral and guan) more than European Americans, and parental warmth less than European Americans. However, in addition, guan will be endorsed to a greater degree than behavioral control among the Chinese American adolescents and their parents. Although Chinese Americans may endorse aspects of behavioral control, particularly monitoring, more than European Americans, these types of control do not capture the central features of their parenting. Their parenting can be described more adequately by the notion of guan. Additionally, analyses will also be conducted comparing adolescents' reports with parents' to determine whether there are greater adolescent-parent discrepancies among Chinese Americans than European Americans, as reported by Wu and Chao (2005) with parental warmth. The second approach focuses on the relationships (i.e., correlational) between parenting goals and parental control, as well as between goals and parental warmth. We expect both types of parental control (behavioral control and guan) to be more strongly related to parenting goals that emphasize Confucian values among Chinese Americans than European Americans. Further, we expect warmth to be more negatively related to Confucian goals, and more positively related to child-centered goals, among European Americans than among Chinese Americans. This study includes both adolescents' and parents' reports of parenting, because parents may not necessarily see their own behaviors in the same way that adolescents do. Adolescents' perceptions of their socialization contexts are of considerable importance because they represent parenting behavior as the adolescent experiences it (Bierman, 1983; Blyth, 1992; Broffenbrenner, 1977). Also, the reliance on multiple informants (adolescents' and parents' report) provides a more complete picture of parenting (Sigel, McGillicudy-DeLisi, & Goodnow, 1992). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(chapter)