Abstract
The family is often thought of as a private space. Relatively little research has been done on the childhood space of the family. Although the family is often considered a warm haven for children to grow up in, it is also a space for child-adult conflict. Based on the researcher’s self-parenting diary, this paper uses thematic analysis and discourse critique to explore a 4-year-old girl’s triggering, adapting, and even challenging of family rules in a Chinese family, in an attempt to demonstrate parent-child conflict in the family childhood space and explore its manifestations. The study found that families contain a variety of implicit rules, which are usually set and interpreted by parents. Four-year-olds differ from their parents in their understanding of family rules. Young children are predominantly passive adapters when it comes to health and hygiene; in play, they are allowed to show more agency and have more room for negotiation.
Introduction
The spatiality of home is important, home are both material and symbolic (Blunt and Varley, 2004). Home constitutes a key site of modern personal life and family space. It is endowed with multiple meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships. For children, it is an important place for them to feel and understand the family and a place to express and establish a sense of belonging (Christensen et al., 2000). Generally speaking, family space is considered the proper and ideal place for children (Clark, 2013), however, family space is not always an ideal space. Some scholars suggest that the sanctity of family space as a safe harbor must be more carefully investigated (James et al., 1998: 53). To understand how children experience family, Sibley (2005) argues for a perspective that focuses on power relations, the way power is expressed in family interactions and played out in family spaces, which he sees as bounded and limited. Home is divided into various spaces, it is not only a place for children to show their personality, where boundaries are delimited, intimate relationships are established, and identities are constructed and presented in the form of personal items or decorations (Bacon, 2018), but also a space for conflict relationship, because it is controlled and monitored by their parents or competed by other family members such as brothers and sisters (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011). As a place of life and social ties, various orderly activities take place in family space, such as diet or housework. McKendrick (2004) noted that “family dining” provides not only an opportunity to eat food but also has strict gender and age roles, the dominant structure of family diet reflects the dominant discourse of family life and the structure of family life.
In sorting out the concept of home, Mallett (2004) points to the connection between the concept of “home” and some control over the environment, concluding that a home “can constitute belonging and/or generate feelings of marginalization and alienation” (p. 84). However, Mallett ignores the concrete, sensory experiences of children and young people in domestic spaces (Wilson et al., 2012). Recent research has shown interest in paying more attention to the creativity of infants and children in family space (Orrmalm, 2021; Stevenson and Prout, 2013). However, research related to children’s agency often focuses on particular categories of children, teenagers tend to embody agency more clearly than younger children (Ansell, 2014, 2009). Limited research have explored the limits of young children’s agency in adapting to family rules and the conflicts of parent-child relationship between them. Therefore, this paper contributes to this by examining the daily living space of a 4-year girl (her name is Yuanyuan, anonymous) in a Chinese family, showing the rules of body movement and the conflict of the parent-child interaction, enriching our understanding of the parent-child relationship experience and helping us to better construct the family space by getting closer to zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) of young children’s agency.
In the following section, the paper first reviews research on spatial conflict in family childhood in the Chinese context, emphasizing that the family is not all about a warm harbor. Then, the research methodology is presented. Based on self-family parenting diaries, I primarily employ thematic and discourse analysis methods. Next, I turn to the analysis of the diary texts, focusing on the various rules in the family to show how young children trigger and test family rules. Afterward, I further analyzed the ways in which young children adapted to family rules and whether young children were able to challenge family rules.
Research has found that, depending on the activity, young children are subject to different levels of control in the family space, with some cultural factors involved. Activities related to health, hygiene, and safety are more restrictive and regulated, and young children often passively adapt to rules, while it is during play activities that young children are most likely to try to challenge family rules and show a higher degree of agency. Overall, it appears that 4-year-olds differ from their parents in their understanding of family rules, they show increasingly developed agency in their application of family rules.
Conflict of family childhood space in the Chinese context
The family is not a place where power is silenced (Wang, 2007: 13). In the Chinese context, conflict in the family childhood space, especially parent-child conflict, has received attention. Parent-child conflict in this paper refers to the tension, disharmony and antagonism between parents and children in parent-child communication, which takes three forms: verbal conflict, emotional conflict and physical conflict. Lin (2011) examined the current situation of parent-child conflict and its handling strategies in Guangzhou families with children aged 3–6 years and found that parent-child conflict in families with young children was dominated by verbal and emotional conflicts and focused mainly on children’s learning and behavioral habits. The reasons for parent-child conflict are that the independent behaviors of young children conflict with the norms of parents, or the behavioral habits of young children conflict with the requirements of parents and the demands of young children conflict with the educational styles of parents (Zhang, 2022). At a deeper level, parent-child conflict also involves power conflicts in education and parenting. The power conflict in early childhood family parenting is concentrated in the parenting concepts, parenting attitudes, and parenting behaviors of the parenting subjects. Regardless of the form of the conflict, the nature of the conflict is due to the imbalance of power relations (Fan, 2022). These studies usually focus on the causes of conflict and rarely explore how children as active agents experience, respond to, or even challenge family rules from the perspective of children’s interactions with rules.
In Chinese culture, people often view the family in the context of ethics, considering it as an ethical organism, a residential union of blood relations and conjugal relations. In this combination, it is not the spatial relationship of the house, but the blood relationship of the family that becomes the center of gravity of the family (Wang, 2007: 13). Generally speaking, Chinese people used to regard a group with certain living community and meeting function, which is linked by marriage and blood relationship (including adoption relationship, which is a supplementary form of blood relationship) as a family (Bi, 1997: 6). Fei’s definition of family from a sociological perspective is more straightforward, as he believes that the group formed by parents and children is the family (Fei, 1998: 163). But in any historical period, the family initially appears as a space, and without this space carrier, which is the basis of all family activities, the family itself lacks the preconditions for existence. The physical space of the family provides us with a place to live, and the people in the family space and the relationships between people give this space vitality and vigor rather than a cold architectural container (Sima, 2018: 13).
Recently, Cheng (2021) conducted an ethnographic study of daily life and group order in nursery classes, using a private kindergarten in Beijing as a fieldwork site and nursery school children aged 2–3 years as observation subjects to explore the process and mechanism of establishing group order in nursery school children. This suggests that the sense of rules and order occupies an important part in the early development of young children. And with the implementation of the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Promotion of Family Education (passed on October 23, 2021), family education has become the focus of attention from all walks of life. We know that 0–6 years old is the most critical period for young children’s physical and mental development, and the interaction with the surrounding environment can have a profound impact on their development. The family is an important environment for children to grow up, and parents are the first teachers of children. Therefore, it is important to explore the rules of the family space and how children adapt to these rules.
Methodological and ethical considerations
The purpose of this paper is to attempt to examine the ways in which young children respond to and negotiate, defy, and challenge family rules, and the conflicts reflected in them, through my family parenting diaries. My family is located in the economically developed region of eastern China, and is a typical family of double-wage workers. The source of data is my parenting family diaries from November 2018 to January 2019, both in written form and as video diaries. The written form of the family diary provides a wealth of information about family parenting, and these diaries describe families’ feelings about daily family events and activities during parenting, many of which involve family parenting conflicts and contradictions. Video diaries provide an additional source of data. Compared to written diaries, video captures the opportunity for thoughts and feelings at specific moments of performance, providing a different level of insight – particularly the behavioral responses and emotional expressions at the time.
All diaries are recorded verbatim, and the study employs thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis. Thematic analysis – the search for themes and patterns – is widely used in anthropology, education, and other qualitative research. Thematic analysis is used to understand the processes of a social phenomenon and people’s perceptions, values, and beliefs about it in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of that social phenomenon (Glesne, 2021: 24). According to Braun and Clarke (2006), thematic analysis proceeds through six stages, beginning with familiarization with your data, followed by identification of initial codes, then organization of the codes into themes, followed by reviewing, defining and naming. The familiarization phase included reading each transcript multiple times, taking notes on the analysis, and working to create a new thematic framework. Further coding included examining the relationships between the initial themes, such as making connections between “family rules” and “young children’s behavior.”
In addition to thematic analysis, we used critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysis is generally considered to be qualitative research (Wodak, 2008). Critical discourse analysis starts from the analysis of discourse to study various social issues, revealing the ideologies and power relations implicit in the use of language. It focuses on the interpretation of the object of study (Chilton, 2004) and emphasizes reflection on one’s own research (van Dijk, 2009). Critical discourse analysis enables a more detailed exploration of the sociocultural contexts and structural conditions that shape the practices of family childhood. This method of analysis can provide ways to explore the control of discourse. The approach is relatively sensitive to the use of language in context, going beyond the details of the text to consider a wider range of patterns and discourses, and is therefore well suited to the analysis of self-parenting family diaries.
David Morgan’s “doing family” (Morgan, 2011: 6) is useful here because it draws attention to the actions that constitute what constitutes “doing family” and thus identifies these relationships as family relationships. The concept of doing family is a key analytical concept in terms of the practical dimension and understanding of family social relations, and its focus on action and activity moves us away from the idea of the family as a relatively static structure or set of positions or statuses. This is because it draws attention to family interactions as mechanisms for the communication of meaning. In this study, the interaction, the negotiation around rules conveys information about how family members relate to each other - including the relationship between children and parents. The video diary facilitated the analysis of this point.
Overall, the thematic analysis highlights the complexity of family space practices, as illustrated by the description of family rules below, and draws out particular cases and situations. At the same time, the discourse analysis reveals more about how control is embedded in practice, revealing the different dynamics of parental and child control in rule response, and negotiation. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Zhejiang Normal University, and all participants obtained informed consent. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Zhejiang Normal University, and the ethical issues involved were carefully considered. This study is not a direct study of children or a direct presentation of children’s voices, but rather an interpretive and analytical study of individual family parenting diaries. My wife supports the study, but it is a controversial issue as to whether or how informed consent needs to be obtained for minor subjects in self-diaries (or stories, memories, documentaries, etc.) especially for young children. In a similar study of family stories about children with disabilities, Glenys Mann’s strategy was to avoid the issue of informed consent for young children by focusing attention on capturing the mother’s perspective rather than the children’s perspective (Mann, 2016). Should young children be consulted directly or should parents decide for their children whether to participate in the study? In my opinion, it is important to actively try to solicit children’s opinions in a way that they can understand. I initially told Yuanyuan that the purpose of the study was to explore the parent-child relationship for better child rearing, but Yuanyuan did not seem to understand. I adopted a different strategy by reading to her all the family events in the paper that involved her. She smiled and told me that she couldn’t remember any of these things and that you could write about them. Cooks argues that children’s agreement to participate, was a more appropriate concept than consent (Cocks, 2006). Obtaining consent is not an outcome, but a process of ongoing communication with the research subject that should ensure that young children are able to participate in a particular way. As I write this paper, I will also keep her informed of its progress to enhance her level of information.
Another important issue is the question of my role. My dual role as both the father of Yuanyuan in the family diary and as the analyst and researcher of the family diary merits further study and reflection (Xu, 2021: 23). On the one hand, parents have obvious benefits as researchers; parents are usually the most aware of the larger context of their children’s lives and are able to capture certain aspects of children’s nonverbal communication (Hackett, 2017). The role of the father as the caregiver of the circle allowed me to understand the family from a “culture-holder’s internal perspective (Geertz, 2004),” which made the family diary analysis rich in parenting details and highly vivid. However, as I was the original recorder of the diary, this led to more interaction between my mother and Yuanyuan, and less interaction between me and Yuanyuan. At the same time, I am also an analyst and researcher of the diary, which means that this study has the risk of exposing my “inappropriate parenting behavior,” especially considering the Chinese tradition of “family scandal cannot be spread outside.” However, this risk may be a meaningful attempt for academic research to gain a deeper understanding of family rules.
Triggering and testing of family rules
The analysis of the family parenting diary revealed that although the family is a warm haven, it is also a space where there are many rules. In general, there are two main categories of rules, depending on the level of parental response, and one is “strong” rules, where “strong” means that the level of prohibition is high and there is basically no room for negotiation. These rules are summarized as follows:
The other category is weak rules, where “weak” means having the possibility of negotiation. These rules are:
These rules weave throughout the family space, and because they are numerous and pre-existing, children need multiple ways to test these rules. Children’s first triggers for these rules are generally presented through what adults perceive as “trouble.” Based on the subjective intention, it can be seen that one of the triggering methods is unconscious.
At night, Yuanyuan was not yet asleep, rummaging around, her hands were dirty, then she used the quilt to wipe her hands, and was found by his mother. Mom criticized to, “No touching my quilt when your hands are dirty. No sleeping!” (20181016)
Young children like to touch everywhere because this period is a sensitive period of development (Montessori, 2006: 31). It is normal for Yuanyuan to touch the quilt with her hands. But if her hands are dirty, she cannot touch the blanket. Yuanyuan did not know the rule of “dirty hands + quilt,” and although Yuanyuan had learned the habit of washing hands before meals in kindergarten, she did not universally associate the concept of “dirty” with “disease.” Young children are not aware of the migration from “no eating with dirty hands” to “no touching the blanket with dirty hands.” This unconscious trigger is often caused by the first situation. Some unconscious triggers are caused by the confined space and have nothing to do with the child’s intention. The following is a transcript of a bathing scene.
Mom told Yuanyuan in advance to take a bath in the evening, but Yuanyuan always did not come, always wanting to play a little longer. This annoyed mom, “Every time I ask you to come to the bath, I get a headache.” After she was called into the bathroom, she walked around, and when her leg touched the toilet, her mother reminded her loudly, “Don’t touch the toilet, it’s dirty.” A moment later, Yuanyuan touched the garbage can, and her mother hurriedly said, “Don’t go near the garbage can.” As the water from the shower got into her eyes, Yuanyuan wiped her eyes by herself, and again her mother found out, “Just now your hand touched the glass (that glass has never been carefully cleaned), it’s dirty, don’t rub your eyes.”(20181012)
There are three rules involved: first, do not touch the side of the toilet with bare legs; second, do not approach the garbage can in the bathroom; third, do not touch eyes with dirty hands. For the first two rules, Yuanyuan subjectively did not intend to violate, but due to the limited space in the bathroom, she unconsciously touched the toilet. If the bathroom is more spacious, then Yuanyuan will not trigger these rules. The third rule is triggered by the child’s physiological reaction. Getting water or sand in the eye and rubbing it with the hand is usually a normal reaction of people, and children are no exception. In the game scenario, children unconsciously trigger the rule more often.
Yuanyuan was carrying a bowl of water and wanted to play inside the living room. Neither her mother nor I allowed it, telling her that she could only play in the kitchen sink. (20181018)
It is the nature of children to play, and when children play, they are fully engaged without regard for anything else. When Yuanyuan was not sure why she could not play with water in the living room, her mother explained to her that it was because the living room was carpeted and once the water was on the carpet, it was difficult to clean up – obviously, the primary factor that adults care about is usually the outcome of this event because of the added burden of cleaning up the carpet. In contrast, children care more about an event, the activity itself, and are more focused on the process and the dimension of the experience. The child in this state is a truly human being.
Another type of rule triggering is conscious, “conscious” meaning that these rules are often already understood by children, for example, the rule about eating food in a car.
At noon, we were getting ready to go out for a drive. When mom got in the car, she found bread crumbs all over the back seat. She yelled at Yuanyuan, “Why are there crumbs again, did you eat them yesterday?” Yuanyuan was silent. Mom lamented, “I’m going crazy, crazy,crazy.” I soothed, “Forget it, she wants to eat, I can’t keep her from eating, right? I’ll clean it up, don’t worry.” (20181023)
Yuanyuan had been told beforehand that she should not eat cookies, bread and other foods that tend to produce fine crumbs in the car, and the reason was explained to her that crumbs fall in the cracks of the car seats and are extremely difficult to clean. Judging from her reaction this time (silence), she already understood why she should not eat bread in the car. What is the reason for knowing this rule needs to be followed, but then violating it? We speculate that it may be due to gluttony.
We can see that because many of the rules in the home are encountered for the first time by young children, the triggering of the rules is often unconscious, but as children’s understanding of the rules and the scope of their agencies expands, the likelihood of children breaking the rules then increases, and this involves how children respond to the rules. We discuss this issue in the next section.
Adaptation of family rules
Compared to adults, young children are weak and they are helpless in the family. They cannot choose the kind of family they want and can only and must adapt to the family’s management style. In this way, dealing with the complex and subtle rules of the family is an extremely realistic and survival-oriented task for young children. The usual way of coping is passive adaptation.
In the afternoon, Yuanyuan finished her banana and then ate an orange. She broke the orange with her hand and splashed orange juice everywhere, and her mother reminded, “Don’t turn the orange petals around on the table, it’s not hygienic, hurry up and eat them.” (20181020) Yuanyuan brings a bottle of yogurt from the kitchen and while walking to the living room, it opens in her hand and falls on the carpet. Mom, “annoying, next time not allowed to do so, you can not take to the table in open?” After eating the yogurt, she wipe her mouth directly with her own sleeve. She doesn’t even take the roll of paper in her hand. We remind her not to wipe her mouth with her sleeve, it’s unhygienic. (20181105)
The rules here are mainly related to eating: no turning oranges around on the table; no sleeve wiping of the mouth. The parents made these rules mainly out of concern that their children might get sick if they ate unclean food. If they get sick, it takes extra time and energy to care for the child, which can be a challenge for parents who have to work. Therefore, parents generally take a strong stance on health and hygiene related dietary norms and do not allow any room for change, which children must follow. According to the theory of psychological development, young children at this stage think mainly in figurative terms (Zhu, 2012: 195). The reason why children can only passively adapt to health and hygiene related rules is probably related to their lack of knowledge of “hygiene” and the abstract concept of “hygiene,” which is difficult to transfer to other scenarios. This requires an accumulation of experience.
Another reason for children’s passive adaptation to family rules is that they lack certain abilities. For example, we forbade Yuanyuan from being alone in the kitchen because we were worried that she might turn on the gas stove in the kitchen (Yuanyuan had previously caused the family table to burn), and 4-year-olds clearly do not have the ability to control fire. There are many matters in the home where children need to ask for adult assistance.
One day, Yuanyuan wanted to eat potato chips and her mom was not available, so she asked me to open them for her. I didn’t say yes. She fell down on the couch and cried while rolling around and telling her mom “he won’t open them for me.” (20181113)
Opening a bag of chips is easy for an adult, but a toddler may not know how to open it, so she has to turn to an adult. In this case, the child can only accommodate the fact that “Daddy won’t help her open the bag of chips” by “crying” to express her dissatisfaction. We know that “crying” is a common phenomenon in young children, and that the reasons for “crying” vary, with crying being seen as a natural response to physical pain. When demands are not met, “crying” actually shows that the child has no choice but to submit to the adult.
In addition to “crying” as a way of responding to various rules, children also use body movements as a secondary means of expression – which is often ignored by parents and is as a sign of “powerless and unreasonable.” For families, children’s bodies are often seen as objects of care, and not as subject/actor. However, if we set aside the “body-mind” distinction for a moment and try to understand children’s behavior holistically from the child’s perspective, we can see that the body is actually a unique silent and tangible language for children, who use it to express themselves. For example, when Yuanyuan said the word “bunny,” she made a gesture of a bunny and asked me to look at it. When she says “calf,” she imitates the sound of a calf.
Young children’s bodies are highly ideational and agential. In the above example of “opening the bag of chips,” Yuanyuan later chided me for not opening it for her now, while holding her arms over her chest, turning her body to the other side, and kicking the chair next to her with her feet to express her dissatisfaction. In some cases, children use their bodies as an attempt to break certain rules.
When Yuanyuan came back from kindergarten at noon, she wanted to see iPad and her mom wouldn’t show it to her, so she laid down under the table and her mom told her to get up quickly. She protested, “Then you won’t even show me iPad.” “Yes, I won’t show it to you today, get up.” She still lies under the table, puts her feet under the tabletop, and yells, “Yuck, huh?” (20181107)
IPad are a favorite medium for many children. Yuanyuan also likes to watch iPad, but not always with her mother’s permission (Mom thinks she read too much yesterday and needs to rest her eyes today). Mom also needs the tablet to work, especially when she sees Yuanyuan expressing her disagreement by “lying under the table,” which is even more irritating. Here, it can be observed that adults rarely understand/interpret children’s body language positively (with the exception of play), preferring to communicate with children by “reasoning,” but children lack verbal communication skills, which often leads to parent-child conflicts.
In general, it seems that 4-year-olds are mainly passive adapters when faced with various family rules, especially related to hygiene and health, due to their lack of knowledge in this area, but in terms of entertainment, they already have the ability to refute them. Since they have not yet mastered the use of language to communicate with their parents (which is appreciated by them), they are very good at expressing their emotions and opinions with body language (which is often not appreciated by parents because of the added burden of chores): pleasure, dissatisfaction, protest. Many rules in the home are set by parents based on safety risks to young children, not all of which are reasonable and may constrain children’s development, so can young children challenge these rules? How do they challenge them? This is the question we continue to explore.
Can young children challenge family rules?
The new sociology of childhood considers children to have agency and to be social actors (James and Prout, 1997; Mayall, 2002) . However, most of the children that the new sociology of childhood focuses on are 10–12 years olds (McNamee and Seymour, 2013), but is a 4-year-old child an actor? If an actor is understood as active in the construction their own social lives (Prout and James, 1997: 8), then it is clear that young children are also actors.
One morning when Yuanyuan woke up, she was too cold to put on her own socks and found a shirt to put on (her mom was already working inside the living room). Then she ran to the kitchen, took out a bowl, opened a folding chair and stood on it by herself. Then, she fished out a bag of cereal from the hanging cabinet, picked out the raisins inside and put them in the bowl with some other nuts. When I spotted it, I teased her, “What are you doing? Getting ready for me, right?” She turned around and turned her back on me, “No, for me. You can’t eat it.” Then, jumping off the chair, she ran to the living room to eat with her own bowl, ignoring me no more and grabbing it up with her own hands and eating it straight away. (20181121)
Most unexpectedly, because of her short height, she could not reach the cookies and cereals inside the kitchen hanging cabinet, and she would find her own way to open the folding chair and use it to get the cookies. By using tools to achieve her goals, the 4-year-old is already a actor in the family. These agential behaviors are especially evident in what we think of as “play.”
In the evening, Yuanyuan was playing with a small towel and accidentally threw it on the top side of the door and moved a chair by herself, ready to go get it down. I wanted to go and help her get it. She immediately said, “Daddy you don’t have to help me.” Then, she took a book by herself and put it under her feet, but it was still out of reach. She shook the door to see if the little towel would fall down. But still it wouldn’t work. “Do you want to get another book to pad your feet? Then you can get another thick book.” With my assistance, she found a very thick book, about 8 cm thick. While holding the book, she muttered to herself, “I have an idea, look at me.” She put the two books under her feet and stood up on her own to finally reach the small towel. She was happy with a smile on her face. She jumped to the sofa next to her and continued to play her “game” of “jumping and throwing the towel.” (20181106)
These rich behaviors in play showcase the creativity of children in exercising their agency. Sometimes, Yuanyuan would invite us to play together, for example, when we were out walking on the sidewalk, Yuanyuan would often suggest, “Daddy, let’s race together to run l.” Although, I am sometimes tired and do not want to run, I still try to participate. We usually affirm the developmentally beneficial agential behaviors that young children display.
However, the nature of agency is complex (Bluebond-langner and Korbin, 2007), and not all agencies are affirmed (Tisdall and Punch, 2012). For example, Yuanyuan often takes off her socks and walks around the house barefoot as soon as she gets home. Once her mother noticed, she would stop her and tell her that the cold air on the floor was heavy and bare feet could lead to illness. The rule that “walking barefoot at home is forbidden” is related to traditional Chinese medicine culture, which believes that the feet are the convergence of the beginning and end of the meridians, a part of human health care that requires special attention. But the protection of the feet is often easy to ignore, so there is cold from the feet. In other countries such as the United Kingdom may not have such norms, which may also be related to the laying of carpets.
In some cases, children will try to challenge the family rules. In the case of the “no playing in the kitchen” rule, we would always keep an eye on her to see if she was alone in the kitchen, but Yuanyuan would break the rule in a roundabout way. For example, 1 day, after we finished dinner, Yuanyuan volunteered to help me clean up the dishes. Her mom and I were surprised, but allowed it. Since she couldn’t reach the sink, I helped her bring in a chair and let her stand on it. Then, I went to the living room. After a while, Mom reminded me, “Your daughter must be playing in the water.” I hurried to look, and sure enough, she poured a lot of detergent in the bowl is playing with it. I was scolded by my mother, “It’s so wasteful.” For some rules, Yuanyuan will deliberately disobey.
In the evening, I was washing dishes in the kitchen, Yuanyuan kicked the ball to me, I told her not to kick it, but still did not listen, I threatened her, “If you kick it again, I will throw the ball outside.” She still kicked the ball at me. I took scissors and cut the ball, “I told you not to kick it, but you have to kick it.” Yuanyuan cried and went to her mom. (20190131)
I have reminded Yuanyuan many times before that she should not play ball in the house, but she always refused to listen, I was greatly annoyed. Mom later reminded me that I shouldn’t cut the ball and it might scare Yuanyuan. I realized afterward that my way was too simple and rough, so much so that mom told Yuanyuan, “Your dad rarely gets angry, but when he does, he is very scary”.
This suggests that 4-year-olds have a significant ability to challenge adults, although, overall, such blatant disobedience appears to be relatively rare. In most cases, children are in the role position of adapting and internalizing rules in the home, limited in their knowledge and ability to verbally negotiate and pursue the rules themselves, but able to break through parental prohibitions through indirect means, which reflects an increased sense of autonomy and developing agency.
Concluding thoughts
This paper demonstrates how young children adapt to, confront, or challenge family rules and the parent-child conflicts within them through the description and analysis of self-parenting diaries. It was found that families contain a variety of rules, many of which are unknown to young children and exist in an invisible state. Young children’s triggers for these rules are often unconscious in terms of subjective intent, and these “unconscious” triggers can be seen as troublesome by parents. Corsaro distinguishes between children as social problems and social problems of children (Corsaro, 2014: 231). Most of these “problems” caused by children in the family belong to the former category and are not really problems of children themselves, but are often seen as “problems” by adults. Here, it is important to reflect on the basis on which adults make these rules. The analysis of self-parenting diaries suggests that the main considerations for adults to make rules are the increased amount of housework and the limited energy to care for young children. Addressing these “troubles” in the family childhood space may require the introduction of social care factors.
Second, it was found that 4-year-olds are primarily passive adapters when faced with rules regarding hygiene and health. On the one hand, because of their lack of knowledge in this area, and on the other hand, because of the priority parents give to the physical health and safety of their children, this leads to conflicts with parents that are focused on the physical behavior level rather than the verbal level. The young child is a holistic being of mind and body (Bian, 2006: 15). The body is an important medium of expression for children, but the Chinese tradition of silence inhibits children’s physical activity (Liang, 2011: 87). Adults prioritize encouraging young children’s verbal expressiveness while devaluing inhibiting physical abilities. This may be another potential cause of conflict between young children and their parents.
In addition, it was found that 4-year-olds are also rule enablers, able to fully understand certain rules, especially in the context of recreation and play, and even to deliberately challenge some rules. This suggests that 4-year-olds already “have” agency (Corsaro, 2005; James, 2009; Mayall, 2002), but not all agency of this nature is appreciated and affirmed by parents. The assumption that children are actors cannot simply be taken as a general premise (Oswell, 2016). Children’s agency arises from relationships in heterogeneous combinations (Gallagher, 2019), and the degree of agency is limited by their own abilities and external rules. Children, especially young children, have limited ability to move freely with purpose. Children are also limited in their ability to negotiate and can only do so by crying or lying on the floor. Thus children are at a structural disadvantage relative to adults in intergenerational power structures (Ansell, 2009). The question of how to reasonably balance physical protection with young children’s autonomy is a deep-rooted issue in family childcare practices. Are children only sweet angels when they are playing, when they are sleeping, and when they are not interfering with adult work? Perhaps the concept of agency can be extended. Children’s agency has an understanding level or spiritual agency (Hemming and Madge, 2012). Agency is not simply about children’s active contributions and involvement (Wyness, 2018: 80), but also includes children’s ability to assess the consequences of their behavior and have the ability to actively stop some behaviors that have been banned many times.
Overall, it appears that 4-year-olds differ from their parents in their understanding of family rules and are disadvantaged in terms of their right to interpret family rules; in the application of family rules, they have shown agency of interpretative reproduction (Corsaro, 2014: 19). This paper is primarily a case study based on a self-parenting diary with too small a sample, and these findings have some contextual limitations and may not be appropriate for generalization to Chinese families in other regions. In addition, my dual identity has important implications for the study. Being the father of the subject in the parenting diary gave the study a unique “insider’s perspective” and allowed for the collection of a wealth of information, but also imposed certain limitations on the study, as I had difficulty explaining some parenting concepts in Chinese culture, such as not allowing young children to go barefoot. This may be a difficult issue for child researchers in own culture (their own families) to overcome. Regardless, this case study did have an impact on me, leading me often reflect on whether I was hindering the spontaneous growth (Montessori, 2010) of young children in my parenting practice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Yan Zhu and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
