Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2012, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (4): 138-163.

• Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The SelfFulfilling Prophecy of Parents’ Expectations: Findings from Migrant Workers’ Children

  

  1. Law Department,Harbin University of Commerce
  • Online:2012-07-20 Published:2012-07-20
  • Contact: GAO Minghua,Law Department,Harbin University of Commerce E-mail:gaomh1003@hotmail.com
  • Supported by:

    The research was supported by 2011 the Major Projects of the Humanities and Social Sciences Key Research Base of the Ministry of Education in 2011 (11JJD840003), which was led by Prof. FANG Wen in Peking University.

PDF

685

Abstract:

The selffulfilling prophecy is a powerful, pervasive phenomenon. This study examined whether migrant worker parents’ expectations about their children’s academic performance influenced the children’s future academic achievements. This study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. Specifically, the former included a questionnaire survey, and the latter mainly was indepth interviewing. The study targets were migrant workers and their children. This paper first reviews the origin and evolution of the selffulfilling prophecy concept, and summarizes the existing research findings. Most studies have focused on the effects of teachers’ expectations on students’ academic achievements. The effects of parents’ expectations on their children’s performance are overlooked. Actually, because parents are playing important roles in the lives of their children, the effects of their expectations deserve attention. The quantitative analyses indicated that three out of the five coefficients about the relationships between parents’ expectations and children’s academic performance could be attributed to the selffulfilling effects of parents’ expectations, and the rest two to the accuracy of the expectations. Selffulfilling prophecies, by definition, start with inaccurate expectations. In this model, inaccuarcy is the component of parent perceptions that is not based on valid predictors of future achievement. Relations between parent perceptions and children’ future achievement are assessed in the context of this model, which controls for major predictors of future achievement. . The parents in the bottom social classes had low expectations of their children. This can be attributed to their family living conditions and educational backgrounds. Relative to middleclass families, families at the bottom had very limited resources. Therefore, the cost of making wrong decisions about children’s possible future would be high. If they had high expectations of their children and therefore invested all in their children education, they might lose all if their children failed to reach the expected level of academic performance. In addition, their living conditions were dominated by the lower social classes, which also limited their expectations. Therefore, these parents usually had inaccurate and lower expectations of their children. The quality of parentchild communication mediated the relationship between parental expectations and children’s academic performance. If the parents had more opportunities to contact and communicate with their children, they would be more likely to form accurate and positive expectations which would reduce the possibility of selffulfilling prophecies. However, migrant worker families lived in poverty. The economic pressure deprived them of time to care about their children. Their time spent for making living rid of the time for communicating with their children. The study also discovered inconsistency between the verbal reports and behaviors in parental expectations. When they were interviewed and answered the questionnaire, the parents said that they had very high expectations of their children, but they didn’t put their words into action. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the limitations of this study. Gender differences were not taken into account. Parental expectations may differ according to the sex of the child, which is one of the major causes of gender inequality. Existing researches discovered that migrant workers have lower expectations of their daughters than of their sons. Girls have internalized their parents’ expectations of them and given up trying to succeed in school. As a consequence, their performance has ultimately fulfilled their parents’ negative expectations.

Key words:  selffulfilling prophecy, triangulation method, reflectionconstruction model, parentchild communication, cultural citizenship