Parent-Youth Relationships and the Self-Esteem of Chinese Adolescents: Collectivism versus Individualism (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019
Parental socialization has been recently reported as a multifaceted concept, which includes parenting practices and family processes. Nevertheless, prior family research generally treated parental socialization tantamount to parenting behavior only and overlooked its different effects on multiple youth outcomes simultaneously, especially in the Chinese population. This study, with a sample of 223 Chinese parent-youth dyads (80.7% mothers; 55.6% male youths; meanage = 16.7 years), found that both authoritative parenting and positive family processes, as measured by a multi-informant approach, significantly predicted higher self-esteem, self-control, future orientation, other perspective taking and lower externalizing problem behavior of Chinese youths concomitantly. Furthermore, youth self-esteem was found to significantly mediate the effects of authoritative parenting and positive family processes on their self-control, future orientation, other perspective taking and externalizing problem behavior, and different facets of parental socialization significantly predicted the youth outcomes differentially. Results of this study highlight importance of considering the multifaceted nature of parental socialization and interrelations of youth development. View Full-Text Keywords: authoritative parenting; positive family processes; multi-informant approach; youth development This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
1999
This study examined how parental practices in mainland China influence adolescents' school performance, including school motivation and grade point average (GPA), when moderated by self-esteem and self-efficacy. Participating in the study were 497 students, ranging in age from 12 to 19 years, attending six public junior and senior high schools. Subjects completed a questionnaire designed to assess adolescents' perception of parental support, reasoning, monitoring, punitiveness, and autonomy granting, as well as subjects' school motivation, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and conformity to parents. The findings indicated that all five parental practices were significant predictors of at least one of the moderating variables: conformity to parents, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Parental support and monitoring were positive predictors of conformity, whereas parental reasoning and autonomy-granting were positive predictors of self-efficacy. Parental punitiveness and autonomy-granting predicted self-esteem. Both conformity to parents and self-efficacy had positive effects on school motivation, with self-efficacy also having a strong positive and direct influence on GPA. Self-esteem did not affect either motivation or GPA significantly. (Contains 32 references.) (KB)
This study examined the impact of relationship connectedness (i.e., conformity to parents) and relationship separatedness (i.e., parental autonomy granting) on the self-esteem of mainland Chinese and European-American adolescents. The findings indicate that adolescent autonomy from parents is a consistent positive predictor of adolescent self-esteem among both Chinese and US samples regardless of gender. However, conformity to parents revealed a more complex series of relationships that varied across gender and cultural group. Adolescent conformity to parents predicted self-esteem most consistently among European-American sons, while only daughters' conformity to mothers predicted self-esteem among the Chinese sample. Contrary to hypotheses, the relationship between autonomy from parents and adolescent self-esteem was not stronger and more consistent within the European-American sample (i.e., the individualistic society) than in the sample from mainland China (i.e., the collectivistic society). Similarly, the relationships between adolescent conformity to parents was not a stronger and more consistent predictor of self-esteem among the Chinese sample in comparison to the US sample. The findings for this study point to the particular importance of aspects of both individualism and collectivism that appear to operate within the socialization processes of the same culture regardless of the dominant macro level social orientation. Another important finding was the patterns of gender differences for the specific influences of either relationship separatedness (autonomy) and connectedness (conformity) on adolescent self-esteem.
Motivation and Emotion, 2013
The present study investigates the association of Chinese parents' collectivistic tendency, attitudes towards filial piety (i.e., children respecting and caring for parents (RCP) and children protecting and upholding honor for parents (PUHP)), parenting behaviors (i.e., autonomy granting (AG) and psychological control (PC)) with young adolescents' autonomous motivation. Participants were 321 Chinese parents and their eighth-grade children who independently completed a set of surveys. Results showed that parents' collectivistic tendency indirectly and positively contributes to children's autonomous motivation through the mediation of AG and PC, respectively. Parents' attitude toward RCP has an indirect and positive contribution to children's autonomy motivation through the mediation of AG while parents' attitude toward PUHP shows an indirect and negative contribution to children's autonomous motivation through the mediation of PC. The findings suggest that different cultural emphases in collectivist-based societies play different roles in adolescents' autonomy development. The implications of the findings are discussed.
Frontiers in Psychology
School adjustment and achievement are important indicators of adolescents' wellbeing; however, few studies have examined the risk and protective factors predicting students' school adjustment and achievement at the individual, familial, and cultural level. The present study examined the influences of individual and familial factors and cultural values on Chinese adolescents' school functioning (e.g., school adjustment and grades). It also tested whether cultural values moderated the relationship between parenting and adolescents' school functioning. Self-report data were collected from a stratified random sample of 2,864 adolescents (51.5% female, mean age = 15.52 years, grade 6th-12th) from 55 classrooms, in 13 schools in Shanghai, China. Results showed that self-esteem (b se→adj = 0.05, SE = 0.01, p < 0.001; b se→grades = 0.08, SE = 0.02, p < 0.001), parent-adolescent conflict (b conflict→adj = −0.03, SE = 0.00, p < 0.001; b conflict→grades = −0.04, SE = 0.01, p < 0.001), and conformity to parental expectations (b conform→adj = −0.03, SE = 0.02, p < 0.05; b conform→grades = 0.10, SE = 0.04, p < 0.05) all had significant effects on both school adjustment and grades, respectively. More importantly, results showed that independent self-construal moderated the relationship between parental autonomy granting and adolescents' grades (b indepxautom = 0.06, SE = 0.02, p < 0.01). The findings suggest that cultural values may influence adolescents' appraisal of parental autonomy granting, which then impacts their school functioning.
Assessing the Validity of Parenting Measures in a Sample of Chinese Adolescents
Journal of Family Psychology, 2004
The purpose of this study was to assess the construct validity of adolescent-report parenting behavior measures (primarily derived from the Parental Behavior Measure) in a sample of 480 adolescents from Beijing, China. Results suggest that maternal support, monitoring, and autonomy granting were valid measures when assessing maternal socialization strategies and Chinese adolescent development. Measures of punitiveness and love withdrawal demonstrated limited validity, whereas maternal positive induction demonstrated little validity. The major implications of these results are that measures of "negative" parenting that included physical or psychological manipulations may not have salience for the development of Chinese adolescents. Moreover, researchers and clinicians should question the applicability of instruments and measures designed to assess family process when working with individuals in families from diverse cultural backgrounds. Article: Researchers in the human and family sciences are increasingly interested in investigating similarities and differences in parental socialization processes across cultural groups. One such hypothesized difference includes the characterization of parents from China as emphasizing interdependence, filial piety, and autocratic parenting, whereas U.S. parents are described as more consistently valuing autonomy and warm parent-child relations (Chao, 1994; Ho, 1986). The research in this area is limited, as few studies have focused on direct comparisons of parenting and parental influence on adolescent development. Moreover, inconsistent results are obtained when comparing samples from the West (e.g., the United States and Australia) with samples from East Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, or China). Such inconsistency may result because current measures of parenting are based on studies of families from the American majority culture (i.e., White, middle class). There is a demonstrable need, therefore, to assess the validity of frequently used parenting measures for use with samples from China. Scholars question the use of Western constructs to study parental socialization in Asian families without considering how such constructs may or may not capture meaningful behaviors among families from more collectivistic orientations (Chao, 1994; Lam, 1997). These arguments are particularly convincing given that U.S. childrearing practices originate in Western cultural traditions emphasizing personal achievement as part of an overall theme of individualism (Lam, 1997). Despite such concerns, Western measures of maternal acceptance and rejection, styles of control (
Parenting, 2011
Objectives. Parents from different cultures differ in how frequently they express emotions. However, the generalizability of the relations between parental expressivity and child adjustment in non-Western cultures has not been extensively studied. The authors investigated prospective relations between parental expressivity within the family (positive, negative dominant, and negative submissive expressivity) and Chinese children’s psychological adjustment, above and beyond parenting styles. Design. The study used 2 waves (3.8 years apart) of longitudinal data from a sample (n = 425) of children in Beijing (mean ages = 7.7 years at T1 and 11.6 years at T2). Parental expressivity and parenting styles were self-reported. To reduce the potential measurement overlap, items that tap parental expression of emotions toward the child were removed from the parenting style measure. The authors measured children’s adjustment with parents’, teachers’, and peers’ or children’s reports. Results. Consistent with findings with European American samples, parental negative dominant expressivity uniquely and positively predicted Chinese children’s externalizing problems controlling for prior externalizing problems, parenting styles, and family socioeconomic status. Neither parental expressivity nor parenting styles uniquely predicted social competence. Conclusions. Despite previously reported cultural differences in the mean levels of parental expressivity, some of the socialization functions of parental expressivity found in Western countries can be generalized to Chinese families. Although parental expressivity and parenting styles are related constructs, their unique relations to child’s adjustment suggest that they should be examined as distinct processes.
Eighty-five dyads of eighth-grade adolescents (mean age = 14.15 years, SD = 0.39) and their mothers in China (30 dyads from urban one-child families, 27 from urban multiple-children families, and 28 from rural multiple-children families) were interviewed individually. They described daily parent-adolescent conflicts, justified their perspectives on disputes, and evaluated conflict resolutions. The results indicated that across urban and rural areas, for both one-child and multiple-children families, adolescents differed significantly from their mothers in their views of parental authority and individual autonomy. The results also showed several regional differences, pointing to the importance of considering the specific context in which conflicts occur.