Abstract
Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US focuses on class-based parenting experiences in the context of neoliberal globalization and immigration. This book elucidates parental anxieties, insecurities, struggles and sacrifices in the neoliberal global world.
Lan interviewed four groups of middle- and working-class Chinese parents living in Taiwan and the US. Drawing on a comparative research model, Lan explains how these parents develop class-specific strategies according to their socio-cultural, educational and financial capital to ensure a safe and secure future for their children in the current neoliberal global era.
The author commences by highlighting the major shifts in family size and parenting style among the Taiwanese families in Taiwan since the introduction of family planning policies and democratic reforms in the 1990s. As a result of the programme, one-child families have become the norm. Consequently children have become ‘economically useless but emotionally priceless’: parents invest all their finances, emotional energy and time in their one child. In Taiwan, parents traditionally adopted a power and control approach in their parenting, but now traditional Taiwanese parenting values have mainly been supplanted by Western values of trust, cooperation and autonomy.
The professional middle-class in Taiwan are the main consumers of neoliberal family planning policies. Lan calls them the ‘transnational middle class’ since they are primarily employed in the private neoliberal sector and, unlike domestic public servants, their employment and consumption is not limited to the local market: it has a global reach. These parents are rejecting traditional authoritarian and corporal punishment parenting, and opting for a more egalitarian and friendly style of parenting, such as saying ‘I love you’ in English. Many parents do not want to be strict like their own parents were; therefore, they constantly monitor their own behaviour.
Academic achievement remains the key to measuring children’s success. According to their available financial, social and educational resources, parents adopt specific strategies to ensure a secure career path for their children. Several middle-class parents in the book spend a fortune on their children’s education and get actively involved with their children’s schoolwork, studies and career choices.
Lan shows that in some cases, parental aspirations for a prestigious career for their children are so intense that many parents relocate to high decile school districts even before their children’s birth. Nowadays, parents are adopting different techniques to raise their global children and making a shift from the traditional method of rote memorization. 1 Some of the parents, for example, send their kids to expensive private schools with an international education curriculum; others opt for alternative curriculums such as a garden school with a particular focus to allow their children to connect with a global community and experience humanist education. Many parents plan their children’s weekly schedule for their studies and extracurricular activities; in this context Lan rightly notes that many middle-class children have become ‘objects of adult micromanagement’ (p. 59).
On the other hand, the working-class also struggle to provide expensive and quality education for their children; they are often less educated and struggle to teach their children, and are unable to support them in finishing their homework. They prefer their children to take responsibility for their own studies. Moreover, the lack of finances also means that they cannot do as much as they want to for their kids; for instance, they cannot get their children treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), unlike middle-class parents.
Interestingly, the parents interviewed in the US placed great importance on traditional parenting styles of authority and control. Some of the parents in the study, especially working-class parents in the US, become nostalgic and sometimes regret migrating to the US as they are not legally allowed to discipline their children physically in this context. Further, they feel more marginalized as they lack language skills for daily communication and due to limited financial funds they are unable to navigate the American educational system.
Unlike the parents in Taiwan, Taiwanese parents in the US often look down on Western education, considering it too easy and lenient. A lot of immigrant parents send their children back to China to study maths or science, or enrol them in special classes in the US. This is often motivated by the sense that their child has to make up for a racial bias in the educational institutions in the US.
Ironically, parents in the US, unlike the first generation of migrant Chinese parents, prepare their children for the Chinese job market and society. Whereas, the middle-class parents in Taiwan believe exposure to Western education will help their children gain global exposure and face less competition than they would in their homeland China, where there is cut throat competition in the neoliberal job market. In Taiwan, parents encourage their children to learn English and other foreign languages in order to be able to qualify for the neoliberal market in the West. Parents in the US want their children to learn Chinese. The ability to speak Chinese aids the second generation Chinese to return to their home country for brighter job prospects. Parents are employing a divergent set of strategies to prepare their children for the neoliberal global economy, which highlights different and exciting features.
The book suggests that nowadays, the world is a global neoliberal village where institutions like family and education are witnessing socio-cultural transformation. Parents and children are competing with each other at a global level. Class inequality affects people’s ability to achieve expected educational goals. The middle-class has the upper hand on their working-class counterparts.
Lan’s research highlights the social-cultural transformation in parenting styles across the wider class spectrum. However, among these modern global families gender roles and the gendered division of labour largely remain unchallenged. Mothers are the primary care-givers and teach their children; many of them even leave their jobs or have opted for flexible hours to look after their children. Whereas, men are the key earners and even live far from the family home to pursue their jobs. The author calls them ‘weekend fathers’ as they are only able to visit home on weekends and holidays. However, the traditional Asian collective values of sacrificing parents’ wellbeing to secure their children’s futures remain constant: parents’ primary focus is their children’s career.
Though the author has presented her work quite impressively, the book has one serious drawback. Lan’s analysis is coloured by her assumptions, and these assumptions are present in her discussion and remain unchallenged. For instance, Lan has strong views on what constitutes good parenting methods. The author makes a judgemental statement against working-class parents. She claims that working-class parents lack a basic understanding of how to parent and cannot give proper parental attention. It is important to realize that discourses around right and wrong are understood differently in different societies and class groups. Socio-cultural values are often socially constructed and, effectively, there is no right or wrong. People make their choices based on their particular socio-cultural and financial situations.
Secondly, Lan also generalizes that all white parents share a friendly and egalitarian relationship with their children. And, she asserts that, unlike Asian parents, they do not pressure their children to achieve academic success. Since Lan has not interviewed any European American parents, this is merely a claim based on generic assumptions and stereotypes.
Overall, this book is well written and investigates a contemporary issue in a way which keeps the reader engaged until the end. Middle-class parents from Asian countries and Asian parents in Western countries will easily relate to this book. Lan has demonstrated that what were once considered parental anxieties have become a nightmare reality of parents’ everyday lives. The global neoliberal economy has opened new opportunities for booming economies like China; at the same time, it has increased performance pressure on parents and children alike. Parents strive to keep their children safe in a world that is interconnected and rapidly becoming more risky and unpredictable. Yet, their strategies to ensure security in a changing world paradoxically magnify anxieties for themselves and other families.
This book is not only for academic professional or sociology students; it is a must read for anyone interested in gender, class, family, education, parenting and immigration. The work is quite astounding and many international parents and families will relate to it on a personal level. The book shows that modernity is an amalgam of modern forces and traditional values where gender and class-values are being transformed and reproduced.