Exploring the Link Between the Government’s Responses to Marketization of Family Life, the Adult Worker Model, and Defamilization Risks: The Case Study of the Double-Reduction Policy in China

This paper proposes a framework that links government responses to the marketization of family life (i.e., increasing reliance on the market to meet family needs) and its views on the adult worker model’s ideal approaches and its responsibilities for tackling economic and care-focused defamilization risks. This paper applies this framework to analyze China’s double-reduction policy, which aims to reduce student workloads and regulate off-campus training activities. The adult worker model emphasizes that all individuals should participate in the work economy. To achieve this, young people need adequate education opportunities for the job market, and families need subsidized care services to give caregivers time to develop their careers. Economic defamilization risk arises when people fail to achieve economic independence from the family, while care-focused defamilization risk arises when people take on the caregiver roles involuntarily. The analysis done by this paper shows that the double-reduction policy can limit profit-driven off-campus training, reducing the marketization of family life. However despite these, since public examination still determines higher education resources and career prospects, promoting market values like competition, students who fail the examination will face economic defamilization risks. And parents are still vulnerable to economic and care-focused defamilization risks because they have less time to develop their careers while helping their children prepare for the examination.