Autonomy, Rights, and Parenting in Changing Chinese Cultural Contexts

Drawing on both a universalistic perspective (self-determination theory) and a cultural psychological perspective (Greenfield’s theory of cultural change), the papers presented in this dissertation examine the joint role of universal psychological processes and cultural transformation in accounting for variations and similarities in parenting, children’s rights attitudes, and their outcomes in diverse settings within China. One hundred and twenty-eight Chinese adolescents (12-16-year-olds) and their mothers from urban and rural China - two settings that have been rapidly changing at a different pace over the past decades with the rise of modernization - participated in the current study. The first paper focuses on how cultural parenting practices are transmitted across generations, and their impact on Chinese adolescents’ psychological well-being. The second paper narrows the focus and examines how the socialization environment and other socio-demographic factors may contribute to the development of children’s rights conceptions amongst Chinese mothers and adolescents. Comparing mothers and adolescents from different settings coexisting within the same nation, encompassing urban social ecologies of the Gesellschaft form to the rural social ecologies of the Gemeinschaft form (Greenfield, 2009), these studies provide insight into how the extent of urbanization impacts parenting practices, beliefs and attitudes, and consequently affects children’s development in a non-Western cultural setting. Overall, findings from both of the studies demonstrated converging evidence supporting the universalist claim that children in a variety of cultural contexts benefit from family environments which are responsive and promote children’s needs to exercise autonomy. Findings also suggested that there has been a shift in cultural parenting practices in China (with a different pace of change in urban versus rural areas), consistent with Greenfield’s theory of cultural change.Ph.D