Children and Parenting

The four pieces of this chapter explore changing discourses of childhood and parenting in the PRC. Orna Naftali examines children and war education in the PRC during the Maoist era, showing the complex and continual debates between disparate views of childhood, pedagogy, and violence. Carl Kuber explores the connections between ideas about childhood in the 1950s and more recent child-oriented developments, such as the three-child policy, curtailing of after-school tutoring, new restrictions on videogaming. Jing Xu, drawing from her field research at a private Shanghai preschool, discusses some of the pressures and anxieties among middle class parents about raising a ‘good child’. Fei Huang looks at social media discourses about stay-at-home fathers in China and reflects on how this emergent gendered identity is represented in today’s digital China.

Chapter Contents:

4.1 What is a ‘Good Child’? Raising Children in a Changing China
Jing Xu
4.2 Chinese Childhoods, Then and Now
Carl Kubler
4.3 Children and War Education in Maoist China (1949–1976)
Orna Naftali
4.4 Social Media Discourse on Stay-at-Home Fathers in China: Full-Time Father, Part-Time Worker
Fei Huang