Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US

by Pei-Chia Lan

Public discourse on Asian parenting tends to fixate on ethnic culture as a static value set, disguising the fluidity and diversity of Chinese parenting. Such stereotypes also fail to account for the challenges of raising children in a rapidly modernizing world, full of globalizing values. In Raising Global Families Pei-Chia Lan examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration. She draws on a uniquely comparative, multisited research model with four groups of parents: middle-class and working-class parents in Taiwan, and middle-class and working-class Chinese immigrants in the Boston area. Despite sharing a similar ethnic cultural background, these parents develop class-specific, context-sensitive strategies for arranging their children's education, care, and discipline, and for coping with uncertainties provoked by their changing surroundings. Lan's cross-Pacific comparison demonstrates that class inequality permeates the fabric of family life, even as it takes shape in different ways across national contexts.

Genres: Sociology, Parenting

256 pages, Paperback

Published July 17, 2018

About the author

Pei-Chia Lan (Ph.D., Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 2000) is Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Her fields of specialty include gender, work and migration. She is the author of Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006), which won the 2007 Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2007 ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars.