Narrative Inquiry of the Parenting Experiences of Chinese Immigrant Parents in the U.S.

Abstract

While traditional multicultural education has advanced school personnel's cultural awareness and the implementation of multicultural curricula, it can also perpetuate stereotypes of certain cultural groups by overstating the role of culture. The widely held stereotypes of Chinese immigrants as super-achievers and a "model minority" may dangerously hide the problems that many Chinese immigrant families face upon immigrating. In this dissertation, I share findings generated from the narrative inquiry of sixteen Chinese immigrant parents. The study was to uncover multiple realities related to the parenting experiences constructed by Chinese immigrant parents in their given social, cultural, and personal circumstances. Guiding this inquiry is the bioecological model, which provides an overarching framework to address all the factors that possibly influence immigrants' parenting. With a focus on critical events, data collected from multiple open-ended interviews and documents were presented in two ways: case-focused narrative analysis and cross-case thematic analysis. The findings show that Chinese immigrants are a diverse group, with each individual's parental beliefs and practices influenced by multiple personal and contextual factors. All the factors interacted through complex processes occurring at various levels within the parents' ecological environments between the two cultures. In addition, several issues related to Chinese immigrant families were exposed from the parents' narratives that have not been well researched so far, including: subgroup differences, the influence of marital discord as a result of immigration on child development, the role of religion change on parenting, and grandparents as major childcare giver. At a theoretical level, notions of the continuum of common cultural values, and the continuum of enculturation and acculturation provide a fluid and dynamic theoretical lens to better understanding immigrants' in-between cultural values. I suggest that school personnel and social workers work towards eliminating pre-assumptions about any cultural group, attending to each child's unique identity without over-emphasizing the role of culture. Furthermore, schools need to take efforts to build effective and reciprocal relationships with immigrant families to better address the immigrant students' individual needs.