Intensive parenting for success : a study of new Chinese immigrants in Singapore

• Main Author: Wang, Jun
• Other Authors: Zhan Shaohua
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Social sciences::Education
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/151446
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This doctoral thesis aims to explain the social phenomenon of intensive parenting on children’s education among the new Chinese immigrants in Singapore. It addresses three central research questions: (1) What challenges do new Chinese immigrants face in raising children in Singapore? (2) What parenting strategies have they adopted to promote their children’s education? and (3) What enables them to practise intensive parenting for the expected children’s success? I argue that new Chinese immigrants (also referred to as xinyimin in Mandarin) in Singapore face challenges for their childrearing goals, despite their advantaged socioeconomic status upon arrival and a relatively familiar cultural environment in the host society, and that they respond to these challenges by adopting the strategy of intensive parenting on their children’s learning and education, which affirms their self-identity. I also argue that what enables xinyimin immigrant parents to do so does not come merely from Confucian culture, nor merely from parental human, financial, and social capital within individual families, but also from the specific ways of resource mobilization that augment their family’s middle-class advantages. Based on the data collected through in-depth interviews, online participant observations, and content analysis of government policies and media reports, I find that firstly, highly skilled new Chinese immigrants in Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is of Chinese descent, face the challenges of language and cultural barriers, institutional barriers (mainly the immigration policies and education system), and social discrimination. Secondly, I find that in response to these challenges, xinyimin practise intensive parenting at home by intervening in children’s learning activities, from which these parents see themselves as a success or failure from how well he or she can parent on children’s education. They also keep cooperative relationship with school while actively seeking support and resources in the xinyimin community as well as in the larger society. Thirdly, I find that xinyimin parents manage to mobilize resources through three interactive processes. Hyper-selectivity provides xinyimin parents with human, economic, and cultural capital not only at the individual level but at the group level. Transnationalism provides xinyimin parents with access to portable and transferable resources, i.e., bilingual competency, transnational social resources, and transnational habitus and citizenship(s), in a transnational field. And the WeChat-based formation of the xinyimin community enables these xinyimin parents to obtain and share useful information, rebuild, and expand social networks, and reshape their valuation of education. My study contributes to the scholarly literature on immigrant education by going beyond the debate between structuralists and culturalists. I highlight that the enabling factors, i.e., hyper-selectivity, transnationalism, and community formation are not individual features functioning in isolation, but rather, these structural factors are considered as interactive processes formed or accumulated by structural forces in the contexts of immigration and resettlement. While xinyimin’s intensive parenting is influenced by their Confucian cultural traits and behavioral patterns, which are often essentialized from the culturalist perspective, it should also be understood as the result of immigrants’ proactive response to structural constraints and their agentic mobilization of available resources through multiple ways.