At the recent national "two sessions", the issue of education has received widespread attention as always. Behind the promotion of the "double reduction" policy, the reward of three-child births, and the development of inclusive childcare, behind the positive policy efforts, are the high cost of childcare and the anxiety that pervades young parents.
An Chao is also one of these parents. She is also the author of "Pulling The Big Child: A Cultural Genealogy of Folk Parenting" and a young teacher at the China Academy of Education and Social Development at Beijing Normal University.
In the book "Pulling the Big Child", An Chao uses his family as a field to trace the changes of folk parenting over the past hundred years through oral history and ethnography. An important finding of hers is that what supports the children of ordinary people to achieve social mobility and cultural transcendence is not the utilitarian desire of "reading to change destiny", but the cultural character of civil society that has been precipitated in the long-term historical development and transcends the differences of the times. For modern educational anxiety, these simple cultural qualities are also an antidote.
An Chao, born in 1985, is a native of Xintai, Shandong. Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University, Doctor of Education, Beijing Normal University, Master of Education, Peking University, Bachelor of Education, Central China Normal University. He is currently an assistant researcher at the China Academy of Education and Social Development at Beijing Normal University. His research interests include sociology of education, sociology of childhood, and teacher education.
In a way, An Chao's story is very much in line with people's imagination of "small town as a problem maker". An Chao was born in a small city in Shandong. In 1998, when the enterprise and institutions were reformed, her mother laid off a clothing stall, and An Chao shrank in a corner of the stall to review her homework. From this corner, she stepped towards the university gate step by step, and was sent all the way to Peking University to study for a master's degree. At the age of 22, she carried two hundred yuan and came to Beijing, which was not easy to live in, and grew from a timid little girl to an independent professional woman, and finally realized her parents' expectations of her - there was a job in the system of "no wind and no rain". For many low-level children, the story can be stopped here.
However, the B side of the story is that in the classroom at Peking University, she was exposed to the sociology of education, gained a greater understanding of gender, class and equity, and also developed a desire for more academic exploration. Perhaps it was her childhood experience of running in the mountains and wilderness that gave her the courage to explore freely, and she quit her university clerk job to study for her Ph.D. despite the objections of her parents and mentors. As a PhD mom, she raised her young children while struggling with academic and family conflicts. It was in this "mother's pull" that the theme of "pulling the big child" was born. What does "pulling a child" mean to the individual, to the family, and to society? She has personally realized that the trivia hidden within the family about children eating and drinking Lasa is not entirely isolated and closed private behavior, but connects the individual, society and history.
In the field of educational sociology, An Chao found greater freedom. She found that when she looked at everyday life as an object of study, the world changed from one thought to another, it was no longer a miserable world of enslaved people, composed of power and interests, but showed a cute and mysterious side; and as her listening ability became better and better, and began to be able to approach her mother as a researcher, as a member of the majority of mothers, rather than as a daughter with private emotions, she began to see multiple aspects of her mother.
An Chao's original focus was on three generations of child-rearing families like herself, but when she immersed herself in specific families, she found that to understand a person, she often needed to know more people. And, when she experienced the joy of freelance writing, she had greater "ambitions." In this way, her research territory gradually expanded from her own small family to the "banyan tree-like" An family. Along the branches of her own family, An Chao saw a broader scene of the times: in the history of folk parenting, she gradually understood why there were so many contradictions and conflicts in herself, and gradually saw the wisdom and strength to get out of the dilemma of modern parenting.
In her view, it is relatively easy to recognize the value of low-level labor in an individual sense. But for the children at the bottom, only by speaking out for the workers in the public sphere, presenting their experiences, discovering their value, and letting their livelihoods gain social dignity, is the beginning of real cultural growth. And she and her team are making such an effort.
At the 2021 Beijing News Reading Festival, we also invited An Chao to talk about parenting issues, interested readers can move to read "Every Past Points to a Future| 2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Ceremony Review"
Wrote | Yu Yu
Why should we resort to history when studying folk upbringing?
Beijing News: In the study of folk parenting, why do we need the historical dimension?
An chao: I mention a passage from Durkheim in the book. He said that modern people simply separate themselves from their predecessors and are more at a loss about what they have in common with tradition. This attitude blinds us to the passions and desires of the present moment and to the real fundamental and urgent needs. The only way out of this narrowness is through history. It can help us see the important things that have been precipitated in the long-term development of human beings.
If you only look at folk parenting from the perspective of modern educational anxiety, you will feel that rural education is of little importance. In the process of urbanization, traditional villages have gradually disintegrated, hollowed out, and rural culture has declined, let alone rural education? However, from the perspective of history, we will find that there are always some common laws in human growth, and we will find that folk parenting has formed some cultural qualities that transcend the differences of the times and short-term utilitarian calculations in historical development.
At this level, we in particular need to appeal to history and ask questions about current education: What consensus or conflicting ideas do we have about education? Are these consensuses or conflicting notions promoting the development of children and history, or is it a step backwards? What has been preserved and which have broken? Are these traditions valuable for continuity? In other words, only by re-examining the historical evolution of folk education can we understand where our "parenting anxiety" today comes from.
"Pulling the Big Child", by An Chao, Edition: Social Sciences Academic Press, July 2021
Beijing News: What do these cultural qualities specifically refer to?
An Chao: The first is bottom-line parenting. This kind of "upbringing" is the bottom-line requirement of civilian society for children's character and quality, including the duty of participating in labor that "authors are not allowed to eat without labor", the etiquette of eating, the rules of treating people and things, and not "starving" other people's things. For example, parents will start to cultivate their children's will from the desire to restrain their tongues, and the people often judge whether a child can become a talent from the etiquette of eating.
In addition to this bottom-line upbringing based on livelihood and practicality, folk parenting also has a reverence for sacred things such as reading, nature, and heaven. The imperial examination is the only way for the hanmen nobles to "learn and excel", which is often used by elite scholars to criticize the "utilitarian" attitude of the low-level people to reading. But in traditional societies, there are very few children of commoners who can read, and even fewer people who rely on reading to change their destiny. People are more likely to obey the destiny of heaven and go with nature, and rarely expect their children to achieve great wealth and wealth through reading, and more to respect and revere reading as a kind of "heavenly way".
In the countryside, people often say "God watch", "There are gods three feet up", which is a kind of "submission" to natural and social laws. People are able to perceive and revere this universal cultural trait that transcends class and age, and correspondingly produces ethical self-discipline.
Bottom-line upbringing and sacred reverence are guaranteed not only by individual nature and understanding, but also by practical participation, collective life, and periodic rituals. Whether it's game in the fields, gossip in the neighborhood, or fairs and temple fairs, these everyday public leisure activities help people build emotional bonds, form reverence for moral laws, and gain empathy with others and the world.
Beijing News: You just mentioned rural education, what is the relationship between it and folk parenting?
An Chao: In the traditional local society, rural education used to be the mainstream of folk parenting. An important part of it is livelihood education. In the local society, every child is a natural labor force, born to see all the processes of labor. Every child of a poor family can be independent at an early age and regard labor as a basic quality of life. But there is no livelihood education in today's folk parenting. Children who grow up in cities lose sight of their parents' livelihoods, and children's worlds are largely purified and fairy-taled by adults.
The second important part of rural education is nature education. Nature can make people wild. In the countryside, children's "wild" means "can play by themselves, don't worry about adults" and "can run and break in", which also means physical health. This "wild" is the life force of the local world. However, in the city of the stone forest, the child can no longer see the pure side of nature, nor can he appreciate the value of nature to the settlement and growth of the soul.
There is also a ritual education of life and death. In the countryside, it is a natural thing to live and die. When the villagers are buried, the children will follow behind the line to watch the liveliness, they do not understand death, but they are not afraid, and the concept of life, old age, illness and death is internalized into a process of falling leaves and returning to the roots, fate. But today death has become an unnatural process. Adults either become extremely afraid of aging and death, or are tired of worldly trivia and do not value life, and a series of individual psychological problems and social care problems are derived. Children have not taken the "life and death lesson", do not realize that all things must equally accept life and death in front of nature, they cannot experience the value of life itself and daily life itself, and often have to go outside themselves and outside of daily life to find some abstract and illusory meaning of life.
But the prosperity of folk parenting also needs a set of institutions and cultures to nourish. Ritual activities such as sacrifices and festivals in traditional society and faith in reading are institutional supports for nurturing and strengthening sacred moral reverence, and if this system declines and the public support system is not yet mature, folk parenting is prone to fall into a state of shallow self-interest. For example, when the local tradition is seriously damaged, the duty of traditional labor, the intrinsic reward mechanism and the spirit of community mutual assistance will slowly give way to propaganda discourse and utilitarian laws, and the historical cauldron rice system and the large-package unit system have in a sense spawned the privilege and dependence of the local society, and the utilitarian nature of reading will be enhanced.
Although folk parenting has its own vulnerabilities and limitations, in general, it also contains three aspects of entering the world, being born, and coming to life, one is to help people to settle down and make meritorious achievements, one is to help people conform to the mandate of heaven and cultivate their self-cultivation, and the other is to help people break through life and death and look forward to the future. But modern education is only the first aspect, rushing people forward, and everyone is breathless. The latter two are the things we have gradually lost in the transition from traditional rural education to modern folk upbringing. I think they are extremely valuable, and the lack of education in these areas is bound to cost adults and children a lot in the future, in fact, in the present.
Improper "small town to be a problem maker" is conditional
Beijing News: In recent years, people have used more "small towns as a subject" to describe "cold door nobles". You once said in an interview that you don't like the "small town is a problem maker" argument. How did "small town do the problem" come about? In your opinion, what's wrong with this statement?
An Chao: The emergence of the saying that "small towns are the subjects" is not new at all. From the "grassroots" of the earliest paper media era, to the "diaosi" of the nascent era of the Internet, and then to the "small town writer" in the era of self-media, every other era, new words are created to describe the children at the bottom.
One reason is that preventing the new forces at the bottom from achieving class mobility is often achieved through cultural exclusion and segregation, which is at the heart of Bourdieu's theory of partitions. But Bourdieu's theories can only explain why such words appear, but they cannot explain why they have become a discourse accepted even by the mockers.
There are two stages of stigmatization of the weak, the first stage is the emergence of stigma, generally the stigmatization of the strong against the weak. The second is that "stigma" develops into "self-stigma," which means that weak people also use this kind of discourse to ridicule themselves. It is a kind of self-deprecation, and at the same time, behind self-deprecation there is also a most extreme helplessness.
Netizens made circulating small town mind maps.
The deeper question for this statement is that we need to reflect on the power relations in it, to reflect on why the weak have accepted this stigma, and even self-stigmatized, and have created a sense of powerlessness, powerlessness, and shame, and how we can break this label.
Taking myself as an example, I have been a "nerd" and "book maniac" since I was a child, and I have no talent, no piano, chess, calligraphy, painting, and calligraphy, in the words of a friend, I will not "show off". Of course, I have been inferior and ashamed, but I have understood this matter through study and reflection, and accepted myself. Self-education and self-reflection beyond the constraints of conditions is the true value of "reading to change destiny".
I think one thing is that studying sociology allows people to be self-critical and self-understanding. I see that there are conditions for not being a "small town subject", and not everyone is born with this kind of luck. Learning and reflecting eliminated my inferiority, made me feel compassion for myself and others, forgave my family and parents who did not give me better conditions, and accepted my own imperfections. But many people lack such education and reflection, and they resent themselves all their lives and cannot understand why their parents cannot give themselves a better life.
The second is that studying pedagogy has taught me that there are infinite possibilities for human growth. When a person achieves financial independence, he can make up for this cultural shortcoming through lifelong learning. But no matter how to make up, we need to realize that cultural creation is always stronger than cultural consumption, and aesthetic creation is always stronger than aesthetic consumption. I have seen a lot of flattering singing, humble dances, and all kinds of "literature" that only has technique and no soul, and I don't think those are more noble than heartfelt and lame singing, relaxed and clumsy dances. "Consumption" culture and art is not used to show off, but to stimulate one's inner growth and self-cultivation.
Read more
"Origin", [American] Lauren M. By A. Rivera, translated by Jiang Tao/Li Min, Republic of china| published by Guangxi Normal University Press, June 2019
The anxious personality of the intellectual proletariat
Beijing News: Related to the "small town as a subject", you used the "intellectual proletariat" in the text to describe the people with professional knowledge but lack of fixed assets. Do you think they have an "internally contradictory anxious personality" that is how it is generated and how it affects their parenting practices?
An Chao: "An anxious personality with internal contradictions" is not a derogatory term. When we mention "anxiety" today, we often think of it as a bad word, but "anxiety" is actually a neutral word. Anxiety is the personality trait of modern people, behind it is the increase in class mobility and the increase in free choice opportunities, which means that some people can get rid of their economic fate and obtain new economic and cultural growth points. So in a way "anxiety" is progressive.
The anxiety of the "intellectual proletariat" has an "internal contradiction" stereotype. The "intellectual proletariat" is often in different political, economic and cultural spaces. For example, there are gradually a group of people in my family, whose academic qualifications are above the college level, and basically have the "stable" jobs that their parents expect, but their "professional knowledge" cannot be directly exchanged for money to support the family. In big cities where competition is fierce and housing prices are high, they also need parents to cover the costs of schooling, starting a family and even raising offspring. There is another group of people who, while making a lot of money, also need more time to bridge the psychological and cultural gap. This group of people is anxious because they are easy to turn over and easy to fall. The "intellectual proletariat" is actually a fragile class, and in times of economic instability, they can easily fall back to the bottom.
The biggest effect of this anxiety on their parenting style is a "diffuse anxiety." It is not directed at one thing, but manifests itself in everything. They are also anxious to eat, talk, work, and childcare... There is a rush everywhere. And they will communicate this emotional experience to the child. However, in the family, emotional interaction is more important than knowledge education. When a child feels enough love, he generates an emotional motivation to learn. The anxiety of parents makes them unable to give this kind of secure love, and children become hate learning and hate parents. Parent-child antagonism is a manifestation and a result of parenting anxiety.
An Chao at the 2021 Beijing News Reading Ceremony. Interested readers can move to read "Every Past Points to a Future| 2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Festival Review"
"Where love doesn't exist, stereotypical knowledge will appear"
Beijing News: Young parents are anxious, not only because they have an "anxious personality", but also because they lack experience. As they grow up, they rarely have the opportunity to learn parenting. And when they have children, they often instinctively turn to books and science. What followed was a boom in a large number of educationally assisted institutions and early scientific education. What kind of crisis is lurking in this?
An Chao: Some time ago I was talking to a mom about how to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is a technical task, such as how to hold a child so that the baby can eat it, and it will not bite the nipple. How to get through breast milk with mastitis. Now many people will find a lactator to teach. But if you have an older sister, she may also help with the process of bringing the child, and you will naturally learn. Only children lack this parenting experience. Their dependence on book knowledge is largely due to their very long time in school, and what they learn in school is mainly theoretical knowledge, often out of touch with life. Moreover, some parents cannot distinguish what is real science, but only give it to use, and lack reflection and criticism of the parenting knowledge on the market.
We now learn to be fathers and mothers from the moment we give birth to our children. But in fact, from the moment you are born, you should start to slowly learn how to be a father and a mother. Because every child has the potential to become a mother or father when he grows up. Sooner or later they will fall in love, and sooner or later they may have children. In other words, our life education, sex education, and gender education should be a series of processes. But in reality, these are often fragmented. This learning is not purely intellectual, it is not a one-time course. However, many times we can't even open the class. We haven't turned it into a public domain of knowledge to learn and discuss.
"Where love does not exist, stereotyped knowledge will appear" Education based on science and books often leads to a lack of warmth and love between parents and children and begins a vicious circle. Due to the lack of public support, the excessive dependence on market-oriented educational assistance institutions and scientific early education has also made parenting a highly expensive and expensive activity, which is also the reason why some young parents have low willingness to have a second child.
Behind "perfection" is the desire to control everything
Beijing News: Today, our society still has an expectation of "taking into account career and family" for mothers, and many mothers will also have a self-expectation of becoming a "perfect mother". Can you talk about it in the light of your parenting experience, what's wrong with that expectation?
An chao: With a large number of women entering the job market, conflicts between women's childcare and work continue to occur. Especially for the mothers at the bottom, they may bear the double burden of keeping their jobs on the one hand, and putting housework and child rearing first on the other. Some urban moms already see education as a "second career" outside of work. In order to supervise their children's learning, more and more mothers have given up their career development and specially "accompanied reading" at home. This status quo of motherhood not only restricts the mother's identity and self-development, but also causes her economic dependence and disadvantage.
The assumption behind the "perfect mother" is that parents can determine the success of their children, and they must be the best parents in order for their children to succeed, but behind them is actually feeling that they can control everything. Recently, a PhD mom shared an interesting feeling. Motherhood, she says, means uncertainty. After becoming a mother, you will find that children are born to destroy the world, and this moment of the child is completely different from the previous moment, today and yesterday, every day there are accidents, every day there is growth, every day to give you surprises and fright. Being a mother means living with uncertainty and accepting it. Wanting to be a "perfect mother" who controls everything is inherently opposed to the characteristics of a mother. With the idea of "perfection" there is the idea of "controlling everything", how can people not be anxious? And by extension to people, to families, and to countries, the same is true.
Stills from the documentary "Gaokao".
Beijing News: In the article "Super Mom, Invisible Dad and Depressed Child", you show how anxious parents and depressed children interact in a family. The article concludes that "strongly regulated family education, highly anxious and controlling parents have a negative impact on children's development and are strongly associated with children's depression syndrome." "Can you share the inner logic of this interaction? How can we get out of this vicious interaction?
An Chao: In the family I studied, the father was often unable to be present due to the needs of work, and the mother and the child were in a state of excessive symbiosis. Although the mother has a high education, she sacrifices the opportunity for career promotion in order to raise her children, so she has great expectations for her children, and to some extent, she uses the success of her children as a "chip" for the game with her husband. However, due to his busy work, the husband did not perceive his wife's fatigue and frustration, but repeatedly emphasized his financial investment in the family.
In this case, the child ends up being the scapegoat for the parental conflict. When educating children becomes the main source of maternal identity, it can put enormous psychological pressure on the mother herself and her child. The child may initially be forced to succumb to the "gentle violence" of the mother due to the dependence of life, but when he has a stronger sense of self, he will rebel against the parents in a secret way. When he faced academic failure and peer rejection, he realized that his family's problems could not be solved like a magic spell, and he fell into complete helplessness and hopelessness, and eventually went to depression.
We need to see that women's domestic work is often regarded as unproductive work and is socially degraded, and sometimes even not recognized by their families, which increases their psychological burden. At this level, the government has a responsibility to guide society to develop a culture of respect for family work and to establish a social support system that compensates for women's family work. At the same time, as individuals, we should be wary of excessive attachment between parents and children, and young parents and children should go out of family life to participate in social life. As Makarenko said, the essence of education is that adults organize their lives and help children organize their own lives.
Beijing News: Not only do some mothers regard education as a "second career" outside of work, many elderly people also have stronger and stronger emotional expectations for their grandchildren, and children are often under "multiple care" and "deep supervision". How will this affect their growth?
An Chao: Multiple care often means multiple expectations. In the age of one child, it is easy for parents to combine all their emotions into one person, want to put the only egg in a safe basket, and have high financial and emotional expectations for their children. The parents' financial expectation is that the child's future cannot be too bad, otherwise there is no way to provide for the elderly. Modern parents also have strong emotional expectations for children, because few people can have in-depth emotional interaction with us, and it is difficult to find people in society who can be trusted, and can only trust the family. If the husband and wife often quarrel, they may put this emotional expectation on the child. If mom and dad are only children, then the grandparents will be very dependent on this small nuclear family, and they will not only potentially compete for pension resources, but also compete for the emotional support of their children and grandchildren.
But how can a child bear so many expectations? Children are very sensitive, and it is easy to feel multiple anxieties from different relatives, and there are cultural and emotional conflicts between these relatives. In this case, the child is forced to become a hypocritical "little adult" or "tactical balancer", and he may be able to please everyone from an early age, see people talk about people, and talk about ghosts.
Along with multiple cares is deep monitoring, or deep monitoring. It is similar to Foucault's "panoramic prison," a guardianship that places a child's every move under an adult's searchlight. In psychology, individuals can slowly develop self-awareness after they have privacy and secrets. But deep guardianship means that children have no privacy, and without privacy, there is no subjective generation, which will create a batch of "giant babies".
At the same time, children still have a desire for self-expression. Only the network allows them to do this, and they can become a presence in the network that a mother can't see. They will create various cultural forms that adults, such as Martian, cannot understand to counter adult surveillance, or maintain a cultural and emotional identity by building online gangs.
The crisis of this generation is that their desire for self-expression is extremely strong, but in the deep supervision of their parents at all times, their ability to survive independently has been seriously weakened, and it is difficult to face a crisis-ridden world independently. I recently told a student who complained to me and wanted to get rid of parental control, that you can't ask for standing and talking while you are content to accept handouts from others, and if you want to get rid of the shackles, you have to bear the risks and costs of free choice and bear the labor required for financial independence.
Stills from the documentary "Gaokao".
The fragility of civil upbringing and public support
Beijing News: We talked about the historical experience of folk parenting, and also talked about modern parenting anxiety. Could you please summarize what is the most fundamental vulnerability of civilian parenting?
An Chao: Because civilians are in a weak position economically and politically, once the endogenous cultural and moral foundations of civil society are destroyed, they rely heavily on an external culture to define themselves. This blind dependence manifests itself in the era of collectivization as a superstition of exogenous ideologies and as an excessive dependence on consumerism and scientific knowledge in modern society.
In the era of collectivization, the emotional bonds of local society were destroyed, family relations were alienated by changes in working styles, and the state's childcare institutions were not yet widespread in the countryside, resulting in a large number of children not being properly cared for. They lack the spiritual connection and communication skills cultivated by "family love", nor can they form "public love". Because of this lack of emotional connection, civilian society has become overly dependent on external institutions and cultures. For example, the unit system has led many people to form a mindset in which both body and soul are given to the collective.
For today's pre-middle class, this dependence exists in the form of consumption. They have no means of production to rely on, frequent career changes, and no stable psychological identity. Anxious about identity and status, they often seek out various external cultural forms as psychological comfort, such as external appearance, etiquette, and talent. In the process of raising children, popular toys and consumer experiences will also become important topics for parent-child interaction.