Paper short abstract:

Drawing on in-depth interviews with nine Chinese mothers and four Chinese fathers from Chinese-Japanese intermarried middle-class families, this paper examines the interrelationships between class, gender and ethnicity when Chinese parents negotiate parental PTA duties within families in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Parental involvement in education is greatly influenced by class, gender and ethnicity. Involvement in children's education varies between middle-class and working-class parents, mothers and fathers, and ethnic majority and ethnic minority parents. There has been an increasing attention paid to intersectionality of class, gender, and ethnicity when it comes to parental involvement in education. The concept of intersectionality, however, has presented a challenge to the exploration of interrelationships of class, gender, and ethnicity in parental involvement.

As a result of quasi-compulsory membership in school PTAs in Japan, PTA participation is universal among Japanese parents, particularly mothers whose children attend Japanese formal schools. Therefore, almost all existing research has focused on the involvement of mothers in PTAs and the gender inequalities embedded therein. As these studies presume mothers assume PTA duties because of gender roles, they do not examine how parents negotiate PTA duties within their families in light of other social differences.

It is therefore important to examine how parents negotiate PTA duties within families where there are multiple social differences, and the ways in which these differences are interrelated. By adopting an example of Chinese-Japanese intermarried middle-class families in Japan, this paper is able to identify differences in class, gender, and ethnicity between the parents of a family. In this paper, Bourdieu's class theory of forms of capital is employed to differentiate class differences between parents in the same family. Based on interviews with nine Chinese mothers and four Chinese fathers from Chinese-Japanese intermarried middle class families, the findings examine how Chinese parents describe their negotiation of parental PTA duties within their families and how class, gender, and ethnicity are articulated or muted. As such, this paper provides insight into the interrelationships between class, gender and ethnicity when parents with multiple social differences negotiate their parental PTA duties within families in Japan.