British Chinese Families ─ Parenting Approaches, Household Relationships and Childhood Experiences

Based on interviews undertaken with British Chinese families, this book explores the nature of contemporary British Chinese households and childhood experiences. By speaking to parents and children of each family, using repeat interviews over a nine-month period, accounts of family life are revealed from all generational perspectives.

This book reveals some similarities between the practices of past and contemporary British Chinese households. Carmen Lau Clayton suggests that Chinese parents (regardless of backgrounds and length of UK residency) not only identify themselves as being Chinese, but also hold strong attachments to 'traditional' Chinese values and norms. For some British Chinese families this causes domestic issues and problems between parents and their more Westernised offspring. However, some parents have also modified their Chinese cultural beliefs, altering their child-rearing methods, intimacy levels with children and opportunities for the child's agency. Reasons for this included the parent's own childhood experience, the parent's exposure and acceptance of Western practices, empathy for their child's experience of being a British Chinese citizen as well as external circumstances such as social setting and surroundings. The complex and interrelated nature of the British Chinese household has not been revealed elsewhere in the current literature.

Carmen Lau Clayton is Director of an ESRC-funded study on young fatherhood at the University of Leeds, UK. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Child and Family Welfare Studies at Leeds Trinity University, UK.