Educational Expectations of Parents and Children: Lessons From the Case of China

Background and purpose: Research shows educational expectations are positively correlated with children's school performance (Fan & Chen, 2001). Asian American and Asian immigrant children including Chinese have shown high academic achievement in relation to high educational expectations of parents. Socioeconomic status (SES) and parental involvements, particularly parental expectations, explain a large portion of children's high educational expectations (Goyette &Xie, 1999). This paper aims to examine the educational expectations of parents and children in China with an interest of internal migrant families, and to test different models of determinants of the educational expectations. Besides the family SES model and the parental involvement model, this study examines children's school/classroom experience, which has not been fully explored in the English literature.

Methods: Using data from the 2005 Beijing Migrant Children Compulsory Education Survey (BMCCES), this paper examines a total of 861 cases (430 migrants and 421 non-migrants). Pencil-and-paper surveys were administered to fourth to sixth grade children in classroom setting and to their parents at home from nine public primary schools in Beijing, China.

Educational beliefs were measured by two dichotomous variables: educational aspiration, whether one aspirates to an advanced degree, and educational expectation, whether one realistically expects to an advanced degree. First, descriptive statistics were used to examine educational aspirations/expectations of parents and children, and t-tests were used to compare educational expectation by migrant status. Second, logistic multivariate regressions were used to test three models of determinant on whether a child expects to an advanced degree: 1) control variables (gender and age) and the family SES; 2) adding variables measuring children's school/classroom experience, and 3) adding parental involvement variables.

Results: High percentages of parents and children, 70% and 73% respectively, expected to an advanced degree, however, migrant children and parents had significantly lower educational expectations comparing to their non-migrant counterparts (t-test with p<.001). Three logistic regression models were significant (model1, Chi-Square=95.2, df=8, p<.001; model 2, Chi-square=153.7, df=13, p<.001; and model 3, Chi-square=175.7, df=17, p<.001). Model 1 demonstrated that migrant status and family SES are strong determinants. Model 2 identified important school experience factors, for instance, feeling of poor performance in school (Wald=14.9, p<.001, Exp (b) =2.4), fear of asking questions in class (Wald=7.4, p<.01, Exp (b)=1.8); and feeling hard to pay attention in class (Wald=8.3, p<.01, Exp (b)=1.9). Model 3 showed the significance of parental involvement, for instance, parent tutoring (Wald=5.6, p<.05, Exp (b)=1.8), parents knowing where the child is after school (Wald=9.7, p<.01, Exp (b)=2.6) and children perceiving higher parental expectations (Wald=6.5, p<.05, Exp (b)=3.3).

Conclusions and implications: The findings confirm the overall high educational expectations of parents and children in Chinese families, and support the importance of family SES and parental involvement. In addition, the findings discover the significance of children's school experience in relation to the educational expectations, which suggests an area for future research, especially for studying new-comer immigrant children. Implications for social workers include developing programs to assist children in school setting and to outreach parents.