The involution of middle-class tiger moms? An exploration of parental expectations in a Coastal Region of China

A recent trend of tiger parenting and involution practices has emerged among parents in China, with which over parenting in the western contexts shares many key features. Our study, based on a regionally representative survey of 1,412 Chinese parents, explored one crucial element of the new parenting trend – parental expectations, in reference to the research findings on over parenting in the west. Although the primary caregiver of children was more likely to be the mother in China as elsewhere, it was the father who held the high expectation that children ought to honor their parents with life success. Unlike the insecure and anxious middle-class parents in the west who were more likely to adopt over parenting, Chinese parents with a higher socio-economic status were less likely to demand their children’s future success than parents in less prestigious groups. The comparative findings suggested that the increasing practices of involution and tiger parenting in contemporary China might be far from syndromes of unreasonable middle-class mothers, as often depicted in the mass media; instead, they could probably be better understood as the hopes and struggles of the disadvantaged patriarchal families to grasp upward social mobility and improve life chances.