Karen Guo

Ideals and realities in Chinese immigrant parenting: Tiger mother versus others

Abstract This paper is about Chinese immigrant parenting. Drawing on discourses of cultural ideals and living realities of Chinese immigrants, it sketches the complex cultural and contextual web of Chinese immigrant parenting, and explains why the tiger mother practice illustrated in one of the 2011 bestselling books Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was a story of a mother’s pursuit of cultural ideals in her parenting. The paper proposes that traditions and contexts both play an important role in the constitution of parental expectations and practices of Chinese immigrants.

For a Better Life: The Aspirations of Chinese Immigrants in Parenting

This article discusses the parenting aspirations of Chinese immigrants, looking in detail at a study in New Zealand. My discussion of the topic centers on the aspirations of educated Chinese immigrants for their preschool children, and their ways of parenting. The “Tiger Mother” practice described in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and other research on immigrant parenting, directed my attention to this subject. It is argued that in times of change from one context to another, parenting style is an attempt by Chinese immigrants to realize their immigration aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children.

Belonging as a force of agency: An exploration of immigrant children’s everyday life in early childhood settings

The notion of agency is being used with increasing frequency in early childhood policies, replacing traditional assumptions about young children’s immaturity and their role as mere recipients of adults’ arrangements. Agency is thus both an educational aspiration as well as a signifier of a strong rights-based political commitment to countering views of children as immature and incompetent. This article develops the argument that agency is inherently a sociocultural product that is driven by children’s clear attempts to bond with others and to develop a sense of belonging. Using examples of the everyday experiences of two Chinese immigrant children in an early childhood centre, the article considers ways in which agency was exercised by the children in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting because they wanted to belong. Some crucial issues are highlighted for practice and policy development in the area of immigrant children’s education, arguing that the shaping of early childhood education requires an attention to children’s ‘invisible’ capabilities, needs to belong and ‘small’ everyday life realities.

Values, risks, and the shaping of kindergarten rules in Japan

The relationship between values, risks and rules is of the central interest in this study. Through engagement with values and risks, this paper seeks to obtain an understanding of rules in the context of Japanese kindergartens, one that is underpinned by teachers’ and children’s perspectives of desirable and undesirable learning behaviours and outcomes. Values education and risk society theory are employed as the theoretical basis to conceptualize the topic. The analysis from teachers’ interviews, teachers’ questionnaires and children’s interviews shows how values, risks and rules are foregrounded in teachers’ and children’s perspectives, building a case for the idea that rules reinforce values and prevent risks in children’s learning.