Parenting of Immigrant Chinese Families in Western Countries: A Systematic Review

Increasing numbers of studies have been done on parenting in Chinese immigrant families due to the growing population of Chinese immigrants in Western countries. This paper systematically reviews 35 peer-reviewed journal articles relevant to parenting in Chinese immigrant families, categorizing them into descriptive studies, simple explanatory studies, and dialectical and dynamic studies, and identifying their major findings and limitations. It finds that descriptive studies tend to describe parenting as a collection of static characteristics, and simple explanatory studies are likely to define parenting as an independent factor mechanically related to other factors. Thus these two types of studies are barely able to reveal the real essence of parenting in immigrant Chinese families. To solve the limitations of descriptive studies and simple explanatory studies, this paper argues for conducting dynamic and dialectical studies, which conceptualize parenting as a dynamic process dialectically related to cultural differences and other processes.