Beyond transmission: a thickened understanding of cultural competence in Chinese migrant families in Aotearoa New Zealand

Cultural competence is widely invoked in multilingual and heritage language education, yet it remains under-theorised in migrant family contexts. This study examines how Chinese migrant parents in Aotearoa New Zealand conceptualise the forms of cultural competence they expect their children to develop. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten Mainland Chinese migrant parents in Auckland, data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings indicate that parents do not frame cultural competence simply as the acquisition of cultural knowledge or adherence to fixed identity categories. Instead, they describe it as a situated capacity that emerges through intergenerational interaction and engagement with multiple social environments. Across three dimensions – moral grounding, identity negotiation, and contextual practice – parents’ reasoning consistently reorients cultural competence from content toward ethical reasoning, from affiliation toward moral coherence, and from reproduction toward situated negotiation. By foregrounding parental epistemic frameworks, the study reconceptualises the family as an epistemic site of cultural production and proposes a thickened understanding of cultural competence that foregrounds relational ethics, contextual calibration, and intergenerational negotiation within migrant family life. The findings carry implications for heritage language educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers working within superdiverse and bicultural educational contexts.