Making sense of parental anxiety: Narratives of lived experiences of Hong Kong Chinese parents

Abstract

Background: Whereas a burgeoning literature has attempted to account for the rise of parental anxiety in contemporary society and explore the effects of its concomitant intensive, anxious parenting style, there is still a dearth of research which looks into the lived experiences and meanings of parental anxiety from the first-person perspectives of parents.

Main body: Adopting the framework of narrative analysis, this study elicited the stories of lived experiences of parental anxiety of 18 Hong Kong Chinese parents (8 fathers and 10 mothers) and explored the experiences and meanings of parental anxiety embedded in their narratives. Analysis of parents' narratives revealed two major constructions of the meanings of parental anxiety. The first construction focused on the experiences and meanings of parenting in a risky, dangerous, and competitive global society in which children were seen as both a project to work on and a problem for concern, and parenting was perceived as a high-stake and doubtful endeavor. The second construction encompassed meanings about parents' awareness of the existential significance of being a parent and the importance of the unique parent-child relationship.

Discussion: The results suggested that parental anxiety, far from being pathological, was an integral part of being a parent that cannot be eradicated or cured. Rather, it imparted pivotal information about what it meant to be a parent in late modernity. The first-hand accounts of parents hence revealed significant aspects of parent-child relationship which were otherwise omitted in the third-person, expert-led conceptualizations of parenting prevalent in the dominant parenting literature.