Intergenerational Gap Of Parenting Among Urban Families In The View Of Life Course Theory

With the rapid development of Chinese industrialization,more and more urban families become dual-career families.Under the burden of financial strain,the parents in dual-career families cannot regard taking care of children as their full-time job when dealing with parenting problem.Moreover,without the adequate social childcare facilities,the children are always looked after by their grandparents.However,because of the distinctions between the parenting views of children's parents and grandparents,there are unavoidable differences and conflicts between them when they raising the children together.In order to study the differences and conflicts in intergenerational parenting coalitions,this paper use the perspective of the Life Course Theory to discover the underlying reason that why the generation gap occurred during the childcare process.This theory takes into account not only the personal perspectives and life experiences but also the social and historical changes,and pays attention to the distinctions between the two generation's life course under different social and historical environment.This paper consists of six sections.The first section introduces the background,significance and related work of the research.The second section presents the germination and evolution of the Life Course Theory,including the studies of domestic experts.The third section shows the generation gap between children's parents and grandparents during childcare process,considering the distinctions of knowledge system,educational theory and modern safety awareness they harbored.The fourth section analyzes the differences and conflicts in intergenerational parenting coalitions in the view of the Life Course Theory.And the fifth section discusses how to solve and weaken the generation gap problem to maintain the intimate relations between the parents and grandparents.Finally,the last section summarizes this paper.