Abstract
The study discusses, contrasts and criticizes the two main research perspectives in the research field of (Asian) immigrant parenting: the etic and the emic approach. The criticism on the etic perspective focuses on the fact that the theoretical frameworks used to identify universal components of parenting have been mostly developed
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and conceptualized from Western notions regarding parenthood and childhood, while the criticism on the emic perspective is that it ignores the cultural heterogeneity in and mobility of parenting practices. Two groups of Chinese immigrant mothers in the Netherlands, economic and knowledge immigrants, were investigated with respect to how they re-built their parenting ethnotheories. The results show that economic immigrants believe in natural growth and direct their children through authoritarian relationships while knowledge immigrants see parenting as a task which demands much personal effort and an equal, transparent and close parent-child relationship. It is claimed that these differences can be understood through both their pre-migration histories as well as their post-migration re-interpretation of their tasks as a parent. In order to further understand how these differences might have been constructed, these same two groups of Chinese immigrant parents were compared in terms of their parenting knowledge acquisition with a social network perspective. Their different networking strategies were investigated as well. The findings from the ego-network interviews with economic immigrants and knowledge immigrants indicate that economic immigrant mothers tend to obtain practical tips and specific instructions directly from experts and acquire practical help from local, co-ethnic, small and dense networks while knowledge immigrant mothers engage in critical peer-based learning in multicultural, open and long-distance networks. Chapter 5 adopts a pedagogical lens to investigate the nexus between four global waves of Chinese migration, specific migration characteristics of each wave, and their various parenting strategies respectively. The four different waves of Chinese migration, namely labour migrants (referred to as economic immigrants in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4), international students (referred to as knowledge immigrants in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4), businessmen in the Global South, and new investment migrants, have significantly different motives and destinations for migration and also differ in socioeconomic status, while the historical, legal, economic and cultural context of their migration also varies. We found these waves also hold different intergenerational contracts, that is, they differ in their norms and practices on how resources are divided between different generations and how investment in education is weighted with other factors, such as economic factors. Different educational and pedagogical issues subsequently are correlated with different migratory solutions, and with different needs for family and educational support. It was also found that these policies are outdated and only serve the needs of a limited number of Chinese immigrants. The chapter shows that this mismatch is amongst other things due to its ignorance of the variety of intergenerational contracts associated with the respective migration waves. This study suggests taking the existing global variety of Chinese migration into account to improve the current overseas Chinese policies to better support Chinese immigrant families globally.
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