Abstract
Chapter 1 introduces the main aim of the book—to understand parental anxieties about their children’s healthcare issues in urban China. It first introduces the theoretical perspectives—the concepts of risk and anxiety, the socio-cultural approach to risk, encoding/decoding and the cultural approach to health communication. Then it discusses how these theoretical perspectives jointly inform this book to examine parental anxiety based on their situated health risk experiences, looking into their interactions and engagement with various types of media. After outlining the main objectives of the research and its methodology, this chapter provides an overview of the following substantive chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
While this book focuses on the practices of parents, it also recognises the importance of a growing body of literature that researches children’s own experiences and understandings of health issues as active agents (see Brady et al. 2015; Mayall 2015). Contrary to the view that children can act as active agents in their own healthcare, the construction of ‘child at risk’ in the media is often based on the cultural understanding of children as vulnerable (Wall 2010). I will return to this point in more detail in Chapter 2.
- 2.
The annual number of newborn babies in China reached a staggering 15 million in 2004 (Statista 2015).
- 3.
The parental anxiety about children’s healthcare that this book analyses inevitably intersects with other parental anxieties such as parenthood identity and perceptions of self, situated within a body of feminist literature. However, this book primarily focuses on parents’ and grandparents’ situated health risk experiences in their everyday encounters with the media, analysed primarily from sociological and media perspectives.
- 4.
This project was funded by the European Research Council (ERC). For more details see http://www.shef.ac.uk/conanx/index.
- 5.
This project was funded by the College of Social Sciences and the Department of Media and Communication Development Fund (2014–2015) at the University of Leicester.
- 6.
It is important to note that Wilkinson, like Bourke (cited in Jackson 2013, p. 18), does not suggest that members of the current society are more anxious than those from previous historical periods, because the analytical tools for systematically measuring the level of anxiety of various groups of people at various times remain difficult to find (Bourke cited in Jackson 2013, p. 18; Wilkinson 2001, p. 33). While this book (Chapter 3) provides some comparative analysis of parental views about childcare practices from two generations to demonstrate the anxiety keenly felt today, it does not attempt to argue that new parents today experience more anxieties than those who were new parents about 30 years ago. Rather it focuses on explaining why certain anxious feelings are more pronounced today.
- 7.
- 8.
Most urban children start attending kindergarten between the age of three and four, prior to which they are usually cared for at home by a member/members of the immediate family, such as grandparents or parents.
- 9.
The concept of ‘middle class’ is a troubled one in the Chinese context because its usage was avoided in socialist China which was believed to be an equal and class-less society. The subsequent underdevelopment of the ‘middle class’ as an analytical concept also resulted in a lack of clarity in its definition and conceptualisation (Kuan 2011, p. 79). Nonetheless, the concept is gaining currency in contemporary Chinese studies, and here I follow Ren (2013) and Kuan (2011), using ‘middle class’ to broadly refer to well-educated and well-paid professionals who enjoy a certain degree of consumptive power. My middle class participants have a typical monthly income between RMB 5,000 and 10,000. As regards focus group organisation, only one group consisted of both mothers and grandmothers. The mixed group was arranged to explore intra-family relations and cross-generational views about childrearing practices. Additionally most of my participants were females—only 4 out of 105 participants in my study were males. This shows that childrearing remains a gendered form of labour in urban China.
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Gong, Q. (2016). Introduction. In: Children’s Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49877-9_1
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