Parenting under Pressure
Product details
- ISBN 9781041264569
- Weight: 430g
- Dimensions: 174 x 246mm
- Publication Date: 18 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book investigates how educational anxiety shapes the everyday lives and moral worlds of China’s middle-class parents, revealing how emotion, modernity, and meritocracy intersect in a rapidly changing society. It offers a sociocultural perspective on family aspirations and the politics of schooling in contemporary China.
Educational anxiety has become a defining feature of China’s middle class, shaping their family life and visions of the future. This book brings together six in-depth studies that explore how parents navigate the moral, emotional, and institutional pressures of educating their children in an era of uncertainty. From the ‘double reduction’ reforms to transnational schooling choices, the chapters reveal how anxiety is both a symptom of and a response to China’s rapidly transforming education system and social structure. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and cultural studies, the book situates educational anxiety within broader processes of modernization, meritocracy, and social mobility. By examining parental reflexivity, risk management, and emotional investment, it offers an original framework for understanding the lived experiences of middle-class families in China—and their implications for global debates on education, inequality, and family change.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Chinese Education & Society.
Ailei Xie is Professor at the School of Education, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China. His research focuses on educational inequality and social mobility in contemporary China. His recent work examines the moral economy of parenting and middle-class educational anxiety. He has published extensively in leading Chinese and international journals.
Cheng Zhong is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Sociology of Education, Nanjing Normal University, China. He has a long-standing interest in middle-class parents’ educational involvement, aspirations, anxieties, and reflexivity. He has published in peer-reviewed, high-status international journals such as the British Journal of Sociology of Education and the International Journal of Educational Research.
