Reporter | Xu Luqing
Edit | Yellow Moon
1
Parents fill the birthday cake with textbooks to make children cry, "985 master mother" hates children is scum, such videos have repeatedly appeared on hot searches, not to mention the spectacle of Haidian mothers (always mothers, no fathers) before the "double subtraction" and parents who can't get out of their bodies on the weekend after the "double subtraction". Parents and children in many middle-class families in the city seem to be anxious and miserable about education, while the educational practices of some folk families are either rarely paid attention to by mainstream discourse or become others who are gazed at and sympathized with.
An Chao, a researcher at Beijing Normal University, pointed out the current situation of folk education practice being despised in his book "Pulling Big Children: A Cultural Genealogy of Folk Parenting". Within the Academy, a great deal of pedagogical research was led by Bourdieu's theory of class studies, which emphasized that family cultural capital determines the social status of individuals. Class theory can powerfully analyze and criticize structural ills, but a single perspective may also bring about a disparagement of the educational practice of the people, which provides neither economic capital nor cultural capital, and has become an object that needs to be compensated for and liberated. At the same time, the study of folk education also lacks subjectivity, and the practical knowledge of folk parents in traditional parenting is ignored.
"Pulling the Big Kid"
An Chao
Social Science Literature Publishing 2021
An Chao grew up in rural Shandong, and later studied and entered the city to work and live. During her doctorate, she returned to her hometown in the countryside of Shandong to produce, and felt the great conflict between the modern urban fine parenting and the rural parenting experience that she had long recognized, which also made her determined to look back at the history of personal family education and examine the "ordinary people's education" that was despised by the modern scientific parenting discourse. The common people are different from the aristocracy, in addition to raising children, but also for the livelihood of the people, they are also different from the urban middle class who have mastered the fine standards of child-rearing, and rely more on intuition and experience to carry out parenting practice.
Reflecting on the current structural education anxieties, is "scientific parenting" and "fine parenting" with discursive hegemony the only "correct" parenting method? Can we see more temperature and energy in the education of the common people who lack the blessings of "cultural capital" and "economic capital", and open up the imagination of urban parenting methods? At a time when education has become a "bottomless pit for family resource investment" (sociologist Qu Jingdong), more and more women are withdrawing from the workplace, and intergenerational contradictions are intensifying, can urban child-rearing learn from the experience of common people's co-parenting, transcend the atomic family, and build a mutual-aid parenting community?
Anxious mothers, tired children
In "Pricing Priceless Children," Viviana A. Zelizer, a professor of economic sociology at Princeton University, explores the shift in the social values of American children from the 1870s to the 1930s: the transformation of children from labor in the family to being "economically useless and emotionally priceless." This depiction of American society is also very much in line with the dramatic changes in the role of children in China over the decades, with children today barely participating in any productive labor, becoming the emotional sustenance of everyone in the family, and being expected to be morally flawless, parents strictly screen cartoons for dark pictures, do not allow children to be friends with "bad children" with bad grades, and do not allow any risk of tarnishing the purity of children. An Chao believes that the most fundamental crisis of educational anxiety is children's financial attachment to adults and adults' emotional attachment to children, "The result is that we take care of children meticulously while imprisoning them in families, playgrounds, and electronic products." ”
"Pricing Priceless Kids"
[American] Viviana Zelizer by Wang Shuixiong translated
East China Normal University Press, 2018
The demand for refined parenting of children also further exacerbates gender inequality. In the United States, concepts such as "maternal love first", "attachment theory", and "childhood determinism" have long been popular, and the dominant view in Japan is the "education family" with children and mothers as the core proposed by education scholar Toshio Nakauchi. In China, the pressure on the role of mothers has increased dramatically in recent decades. Jin Yihong, a professor at Jinling Women's College of Nanjing Normal University, pointed out that since the 1990s, China has set off a trend of "mother teaching", advocating that good mothers should have the courage to take responsibility and sacrifice self-development for their children, which has also caused many mothers to have a sense of guilt when they are in conflict with work and childcare, and the phenomenon of full-time mothers is increasing. Tao Yanlan, associate professor of sociology at Suzhou University of Science and Technology, also analyzed the "motherhood" discourse in the Chinese Parenting Journal, and she summed up the ideal mother image constructed by these discourses: willing to spend high education funds, following the guidance of parenting experts, and putting everything first in the family and children. An Chao observed in the field that today, in The Chinese urban family, "strict mother, play father, and loving ancestor" has replaced the "strict father and loving mother" role division of labor in traditional society, and the mother has become the general helmsman and commander of education. In order to urge their children to learn, more and more mothers in the An family are not worried about the education methods of the previous generation, and choose to give up their career development to accompany them at home. This also puts tremendous psychological pressure on children, and anxious mothers and tired children together constitute an educational dilemma for the urban middle class.
Educational anxiety is also filled with a large number of "scientific parenting" discourse, such as "family education should be professionalized" and "parents should be trained to work". Sharon Hays, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, notes that scientific parenting advocates a "child-centered, expert-led, emotionally engaged, labor-intensive, and high-consumption parenting style." An Chao also found in the process of doing fieldwork on his family that the new generation of young parents in the city often do not believe in natural achievement parenting, the enthusiasm for "professional institutions" and "professional books" is very high, the first female doctor in the family An Dejing is a representative of scientific parenting, she spent more than 100,000 yuan to report a lot of family education classes, parent classes, parent schools, etc., and also took out almost all of her leisure time to learn parenting knowledge.
However, scientific parenting is not always correct, in the interface culture previous interview on middle-class parenting anxiety, Zhang Cong, assistant professor of the School of Social Development and Public Policy of Fudan University, pointed out that the "parenting science" in many public discourses is actually more of an out-of-context interpretation of a certain theory, and the academic community itself has no only answer to how to correctly raise children. Scientific parenting that arises in middle-class families in Western countries often requires high time and financial resources, which has caused great pressure on the family, and An Dejing needs to constantly find a psychologist to dispel the anxiety and loss in her heart under the high standards of scientific parenting, while her children are also unhappy, in the environment of test-taking education, he always feels that his performance in school is sorry for his mother's efforts. The discursive hegemony of scientific parenting has also created a stigma of natural achievement parenting and nurturing intuition – the perfect mother is suitable for the upper middle class with a good economy, the civilian parent becomes an unqualified parent under the discourse of scientific parenting, and the normal mother becomes a "failed mother".
Illustrations of attachment to theory (Image: Youtube) "merit", character and peer learning in the education of ordinary people
In an online conversation with An Chao, Xu Jing, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, said, "Most parenting books now emphasize the nuclear family, child-centered and standard. In fact, if we put aside the familiar style and look at a wider world, behind the so-called "scientific parenting" is a set of rationalist powers and systems, if you refer to anthropology and folk pedagogical research, folk parenting methods in different cultures around the world are diverse. As a rural child who entered the big city through study and further education, An Chao found in the fieldwork of his family education history that the education of the local society and the people he received since childhood has left many precious marks for himself, or may provide new possibilities for the crux of today's urban education.
Contrary to the stereotype of "small town as a problem maker" and "reading changes destiny" of utilitarian reading, "giving back to society" often appears in local civil society as a purpose of exhorting reading, and such public reading goals are difficult to find in the current fierce urban competition for education. In An Chao's observation, although the education of the common people has different degrees of utilitarianism in different periods, it has always been transcendent and public. People's purpose of learning is not only self-interest and material, the elderly believe that children read to "learn well", "good" is "to walk the right path", "useful to people", etc., rather than just "practical" for themselves, "merit" in the education of people in the village is more important than "merit". An Chao found that this sense of "merit" is reflected in each generation, and the readers in the village often do their best to help the clan after economic independence, completing economic returns and moral rewards. People have a pure spiritual yearning for reading, and many villagers, although they do not have the opportunity to read, will look for every opportunity to search for something with words. The elderly who have not gone to school will always keep the pen, ink and paper at home, writing and drawing.
Unlike the fierce educational competition for the pursuit of "getting ahead", An Chao noticed that the children in the common people's families may not be very successful when they grow up, but they are rarely corrupt, and she credits the "bottom-line education" in the ordinary people's education. Bottom-line education mainly includes an emphasis on hard work, moderation and compassion, which are important qualities in livelihood, such as "no work and no food" (industriousness), "no hunger, no reaching out" (self-control), and "gratitude and giving back". Bottom-line education is internalized in daily life, etiquette, and speech, which does not guarantee that children can get ahead when they become adults, but at the same time prevents them from falling into the bottom of society. For the sake of livelihood, the people will also emphasize self-reliant labor, such as children's ability to take care of their own lives and take care of themselves, emphasize public welfare work, and encourage children to receive income from an early age to give back to society.
Many studies have argued that leisure is one of the characteristics of aristocratic education, as opposed to labor, while the commoner class, which is busy with livelihood, is regarded as having little leisure and spiritual life. However, An Chao's fieldwork found that leisure activities are an important part of the education of ordinary people, and the leisure of civilians is often combined with livelihood. Children pick fruit and wheat while playing with their peers, although the game is often accompanied by violence and injury, but children also learn to control their aggression, such as the "hit people do not punch in the face" rule, but also in the game to exercise courage, cultivate partnership. Xu Jing also mentioned in the dialogue that children of African gathering tribes rarely play alone, play and livelihood, labor are often combined, and childhood learning is traditionally informal, which cultivates children's strong curiosity. In today's China, from research to practice, there is a great emphasis on parent-child relationship education, and the importance of peer learning ( peer learning ) – the acquisition of social knowledge and the cultivation of self-reliance in the process of getting along with peers .
Children learn from each other in play (Image: Visual China)
An Chao pointed out in the book "Pulling The Big Childhood" that the secular conversation in civilian life (La Ya) is also an important part of leisure life, when the elderly play chess, "people on the side of the East Parents, Li Jia short, these words also fall into the ears of children", children also learned from the adult world's moral supervision, judgment, indoctrination; there are often mobile craftsmen in the village, to the village to do shaving heads, mending pots and other work, children will often gather around to listen to them talk about fresh stories outside the village, enriching the understanding of the world. In the local society, children have many opportunities to participate in public leisure activities, such as markets and temple fairs, festivals and festivals. These public lives are both bound to livelihood and full of humanity, allowing children to learn about the human relations and buying and selling friendships in society, such as "buying and selling is not benevolent", "chatting about two dishes when the sky is leaving, this time the change is not brought to make up next time". In the red and white celebrations, the children also acquire the original concepts of death, love and sex; in the funeral ceremony, "the children follow behind the line to watch the hilarity, they do not understand the 'death', but they are not afraid, and the children follow the adults through the whole ceremony, which can slowly eliminate the fear of death." Whether it's experiencing non-real violence through peer play, chatting with a wide variety of people, or participating in public life, children can learn later social experiences in these activities. By contrast, parenting that overprotects children, or even isolates them from society, can be counterproductive, hindering the possibility of children to develop morality, openness of mind, discovery of peers, relationship with other adults, and understanding of the world in social participation.
Is it possible for urban parenting to surpass the atomized nuclear family?
An chao observed that urban parenting behavior is increasingly relegated to the nuclear family, and children seem to become the private property of their parents. The "uncontrollable baby bump" shows that while parents' feelings for their children are becoming more and more personal, they are also increasingly lacking in public love for other people's children. An Dejing's child mentioned in his self-statement, "My mother often said, why does my mother care about you instead of the passers-by on the street? Because they have nothing to do with me, I only focus on my own children. These words express my mother's unique love for me. When adults cut off ties with the public society, this "unique" love imprisons both children and parents in a small space, which not only limits the development of parents and children, but also makes the family bear great parenting pressure. Zelize also pointed out the phenomenon of the sanctification of children in modern society, adults after suffering from indifferent commercial culture and alienated labor in the world of capital, turn all emotional and spiritual dependence to children, children become sacred beings like religion, and the family becomes a safe haven in modern risk society, rather than a bridge to the vast world for individuals.
In fact, from the perspective of human history, the parenting model centered on the atomized nuclear family is a very recent product. During the farming period, the parenting model of Chinese civilians is kinship, and the parenting of a family relies on family support and female cooperation, as well as mutual care with villagers, such as when a child lacks milk, another mother can help feed, such as some children with difficult conditions who "eat a hundred meals and wear a hundred clothes" to grow up. It is true that a close social bond of acquaintances and relatives can lead to many problems, such as the difficulty of maintaining the privacy of life and the violation of personal boundaries. But there is no doubt that this model of mutual support and co-parenting is also desirable, both to alleviate the enormous pressure on parents, especially mothers, and to not limit parenting to two generations of intense conflict.
How can love for children transcend the boundaries of the private family and free children and adults from the family and lead them to public life? Many places are trying to experiment with mutual-aid parenting models that go beyond nuclear families. The "Four Rings Play Group" is a mutual aid organization initiated by teachers and students of Beijing Normal University at the Beijing Four Ring Farmers' Market, where foreign vendors face the problem of children "difficult to enter the kindergarten" in Beijing, and they themselves have no time to take care of and accompany their children due to the busy work of the vegetable market. Teachers and students of Beijing Normal University borrowed from the British "community family self-help parenting" in the 1960s, organized parental rotation of vendors, organized book clubs, outings, toy making, and provided a basic preschool education and social environment for children in the vegetable market. After the "double reduction" policy, community mutual aid childcare organizations also appeared in Wujiaochang Street in Shanghai. During the holidays, working parents are neither willing to leave their children alone at home nor to entrust their education to expensive cram schools on the market. As a result, parents spontaneously rely on their expertise to organize classes, taking turns to accompany the children in their vicinity. "My child" becomes "our child," family parenting becomes a small public life, and mutual aid organizations create diverse and complex community connections that transcend the nuclear family.
The Story of the Four Rings Game Group
Yan Zhang, editor-in-chief
Beijing Normal University Press, 2009
Li Jie, associate professor of the School of Social Work at China Women's College, said in the article "Rediscovering Children's | Behind the "Chicken Baby": From 'Outsourcing' Extracurricular Life to Community Mutual Aid Parenting", "From the perspective of the length of history, raising children has completely fallen into the family is only a recent thing, and parenting has a public nature, and is not limited to the care of children and families, but also includes creating a social community and maintaining other different natures of labor such as meaning bonds, emotions and values." An Chao believes that today's urban families can learn from the co-parenting experience of ordinary people's education, establish a mutual assistance and parenting community with a sense of boundaries, and let education surpass private ownership families. Governments should also establish public spaces suitable for human interaction, such as freer, unorganized places of communication such as community gardens and urban parks, rather than allowing cities to be occupied by real estate green spaces in commercial centers. At the same time, society should also be more tolerant of marginal educational attempts formed spontaneously by people, so that parents and children have the opportunity to liberate themselves from a single educational imagination.
bibliography:
Qunxue Academy An Chao's "Pulling The Big Child" Salon Discussion Minutes https://book.douban.com/review/13899996/
Viviana Zelize, "Pricing Priceless Children: The Social Value of Children in Change," East China Normal University Press, 2018
Can "Scientific Parenting" Alleviate parenting anxiety in the urban middle class? ), interface culture https://www.jiemian.com/article/2189905.html
"Rediscovering Children's | Behind the "Chicken Baby": From "Outsourcing" Extracurricular Life to Community Mutual Aid parenting", the surging thought market https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/TTdpVAnPDjeTl4k5J7sBww