英文摘要 |
The dominant repertoire of childrearing in Taiwan has greatly transformed under Western influences over the last two decades. Parents of different class backgrounds, however, have uneven access to relevant cultural resources; this not only shapes their varied styles of childrearing but also impacts their children’s life chances in the changing educational environment. Through in-depth interviews and household observations, this paper compares middle-class and working-class parents in terms of their narratives of parenthood, parent-child interactive styles, and educational strategies. I criticize the literature on childrearing and class reproduction for reducing social class to dichotomous categories determined by economic structure; I also contest the assumption that class habitus continues across generations. The case of Taiwan shows that parents may change the habitus inherited from the family of origin through deliberate reflection and that parenting constitutes a social field of negotiating class boundaries. My research demonstrates ambiguities and contradictions in the everyday practice of parenting, including a gap between cultural scripts and parentchild interactions, and a clash between family life and school expectation. Neither the middle class nor the working class is a homogenous group without internal divides. Based on two coordinates—parents’ volumes and composition of capitals (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capitals) and their orientation toward the pursuit of “goods” (prioritizing competitive mobility or natural development), Imap a “field of parenting” to analyze the process of boundary-making, in which parents are “doing class” in everyday family life. |