Dr YUWEI XU Yuwei.Xu@nottingham.ac.uk
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Chang Liu
Yun Yu
Mehmet Toran
Ramazan Sak
İkbal Tuba Şahin-Sak
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly during periods of quarantine, parents and children were sometimes together in ways which contrasted their pre-pandemic life. This paper uses a reflective parenting lens and processual approach to analyse the quarantine experiences of twenty-four parents of three-to-six-year-olds from China and Türkiye, gathered in semi-structured interviews. The paper reveals not only that Chinese and Turkish parents were reflective (responding to their child’s needs and emotions, recognising positive and negative aspects of their own parenting and wider parenting discourses, showing awareness of the pandemic’s impact on child and family wellbeing, and adapting their parenting practices accordingly) but that such reflections engaged with contemporary shifts in parenting, in particular around: (i) the role of the parent; (ii) ‘fixing’ the child; (iii) the parent-child hierarchy; and (iv) grandparent involvement in parenting. The practicalities of the pandemic context are shown to enhance social evolution towards reflective parenting by increasing parent-child interaction. However, the paper also highlights that practising reflective parenting against traditional parenting scripts is sometimes challenging, uncomfortable and partial. Structural issues in Chinese and Turkish contemporary life which hinder reflective parenting are highlighted, such as working patterns, grandparent involvement, and social scripts that interact with parenting practices. Reflective parenting, assumed to be less common in these contexts, may be inhibited by structural dimensions which had less impact in the quarantine period. However, when Chinese and Turkish parents are reflective, they define their own practices and resist, at least in part, traditional notions of parenting.
Citation
Lehner-Mear, R., Xu, Y., Liu, C., Yu, Y., Toran, M., Sak, R., & Şahin-Sak, İ. T. (2025). Chinese and Turkish parents’ reflective parenting: accelerating shifts in contemporary parenting during pandemic contexts. Journal of Family Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2025.2495305
