Conflict, Coping And Reconciliation: Intergenerational Relations In Chinese Immigrant Families

a. In her work “Conflict, Coping, and Reconciliation: Intergenerational Relations in Chinese Immigrant Families,” author Min Zhou discusses the generation gap between Chinese immigrant parents and their children. As Zhou states, the Chinese immigrant population in the United States started as individuals but has now evolved into a family community. These immigrants come from different geographical, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds. Despite all their different stories, one thing that is common between all these immigrants is the generation gap between the parents and children. This gap is just one of the many problems Chinese immigrant families deal with, and is more prominent in “post-1965 Chinese immigrants,” as Zhou explains. She …show more content…
Children begin to distance themselves from family values and traditions, while parents worry that their children “have too much freedom, too little respect for authority, and too many unfavorable stimuli in school, on the street, and on the television screen at home.” [insert one more sentence here] Zhou explains the heart of the issue in just a few words, explains that Chinese youths “are torn between wanting to please their parents and succeed educationally,” but they feel “overwhelmed and constrained by parental pressures, rules, and orders.” However, the Chinese immigrant’s support system in a new country helps families manage these generation gaps to a certain degree. Despite increased degrees of parental pressure and family conflicts, Chinese children still “end up doing what their parents expect them to do,” and a large contributor to this is the society in which they …show more content…
In her work Parenting Out of Control, Margaret K. Nelson examines how parental practices vary by social class. Of the classes she discusses, two are the middle class and professional middle class. These parents and children both feel under pressure to achieve significant socioeconomic progress, but are afraid what might happen if they can’t get there. Nelson stresses that whether middle or professional middle class, every parents “expressed concern about her or his child’s educational future, and every single parent expressed hope that her or his child would go on to some form of education after high school.” But, Nelson explains, social class plays a role in educational experience and performance. For example, professional middle class parents are informed about learning disabilities and the impact they can have on the student, therefore they keep an eye out for signs of any such disabilities in their student, and work to make special accommodations should the need arise. Professional middle class parents also prefer to send their children to private schools as opposed to public schools, where they work with the school administration to ensure excellence in education, with a goal to secure higher level education for their children in a prestigious university. The professional middle class also tend to live “in neighborhoods with higher median incomes, more expensive homes, and a more highly educated population” than middle-class families. Professional middle class