About this session

Friday, 4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Academic Expectations of Chinese Parents on their Adolescent Child: Visions, Communication, Practices, and Impacts.

In more collectivistic societies like China, academic success is often seen as a shared responsibility and honor among the family. Consequently, Chinese adolescents may internalize their parents’ expectations on achieving beyond their own. Using mixed methods, this symposium features voices from both Chinese adolescents and their mothers to understand parents’ academic expectations, related parenting practices, and their association with adolescents’ academic performance. The first paper examined the heterogeneity of perceived academic stress among Chinese adolescents and its association with academic excellence. Latent class and regression analyses indicate that most high school students experience high levels of stress from both self and parental expectations, while those with lower stress levels are more likely to achieve excellence. The second paper investigated how parents express academic expectations, revealing distinct latent profiles of parental responses to their children’s academic achievements. Longitudinal data analysis suggests that adolescents’ perceptions of parental expectations differentially affect their academic self-esteem and learning persistence based on these response profiles. The third paper centered the voices of mothers of Chinese high schoolers through in-depth interviews to understand parental academic expectations. While emphasizing holistic development, mothers acknowledged that academics remained major in their daily communication with children. They face a dilemma between feeling obligated to actively foster their children’s success and feeling helpless towards their children’s academic pressure. The discussant will address the nuances of academic stress, parental expectations, and parenting practices within China’s cultural context, highlighting the value of a person-centered approach and interviews in further understanding these issues.

Paper #1
Title	Typologies and Correlates of Perceived Academic Stress Among Chinese Adolescents: A Latent Class Analysis
Presenting author	Yawei Huang, M.Ed., Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development

Paper #2
Title	Profiles of Chinese Parents’ Academic Responses: Links with Parents’ Academic Expectation and Children’s Math Learning
Presenting author	Yeqing Li, East China Normal University School of Psychology and Cognitive Science

Paper #3
Title	Better Scores, Better Future? Chinese Mothers Striving to Balance Children’s Academic Achievement and Holistic Development
Presenting author	Lingyan Hu, University of Pennsylvania

View all paper details

Session chair
Yawei Huang, M.Ed., Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development,

Discussant
Siman Zhao, Ph.D., University of Dayton College of Arts and Sciences: Psychology,

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