Parenting Styles and Children's Satisfaction with Parenting in China and the United States

Abstract

Since the People's Republic of China established its one child family policy in 1979, Chinese families have undergone great changes from their traditional system. While this policy still is not fully implemented in all parts of the country, it has introduced to millions of people major change in family composition, change which will inevitably affect family interactions, particularly parent-child relationships. The study of changes occurring in the first cohort of one-child Chinese families may have heuristic value for succeeding generations and may support the efforts of the emerging parent education movement in China, described by Meredith (1992).For 2,000 years, the family in China was highly valued through having large families, being parents, and respecting the authority of elders. Scholars agree that an authoritarian style was the norm in the Chinese traditional family System, based on philosophy (Tseng and Wu, 1985; Lau and Chueng, 1987). The relationship between parents and children was described as parental leadership with power; children were expected to obey (Tseng & Wu, 1985).After The People' s Republic of China was established in 1949, the government made great effort to change fundamental social relationships among individuals and the family, and other social systems as well. (Zhangling, 1990. Tseng & Wu (1985); in their study of authoritarian power in the Chinese family, concluded that with modernization since 1949, the power structure of the Chinese family is moving from patriarchal to an equalitarian relationship. To some extent, these changes may have been underway before the People's Republic was established in 1949, as noted by Goode (1963).Goode's (1963) thesis is that Western ideological influences, particularly the value of individual freedom of choice, may have their most powerful effect in other cultures through the changes they encourage within families. For example, in societies which have the practice of arranging marriages by parental choice, the appeal of the Western practice of individual mate selection may undermine the traditional parent-child relationship. Changes within family microsystems, toward greater individual choice and more democratic decision-making, eventually may affect changes at the social, macrosystem level. Today, many family scholars would describe reciprocal and dynamic influences between microlevel (family) and macrolevel (society), rather than the unidirectional model theorized by Goode. The impact of modernization in Eastern countries therefore may diverge considerably from the Western pattern, as indicated in discussions of the Confucian hypothesis (Kahn, 1979). The present study focuses only on changes within family microsystems, as these changes should be documented before drawing inferences concerning their relationship to the macrosystem.Recent changes in the parent-child relationship have become source of concern for both Chinese parents and their children as well as social scientists. Contemporary Chinese fathers in one recent study reported that disciplining of children is a stressful and unpleasant aspect of parenting (Abbott et al., 1992: 49). Despite these changes, recent research on the Chinese parent-child relationship is almost blank in the literature. However, it is very important for social scientists to identify and examine new characteristics which may be developing in the parent-child relationship in the unique setting of China, under its one child family policy. Study of the Chinese parent-child relationship will help one fourth of the people in this world to experience their parent role more positively rather than distressfully. Such studies also will benefit children, because more consequential than family type for children's well-being is the quality of the parent-child and other family relationships (Demo, 1992).The purposes of the present study were to compare families and children in China and United States in terms of styles and children's perceived satisfaction with the parent-child relationship, to: a) develop information which can help Chinese parents establish healthy and positive relationship with their only children, and b) gain better understanding of similarities and differences in styles between these two cultures. …

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