A Comparative Study Of Parenting Problems And Needs Characteristics Between Chinese And American Parents

The quality of early family upbringing is of great significance,and the pressure on parents to raise children is increasing day by day.However,the corresponding parental support and guidance are obviously insufficient.The online parental question and answer community provides strong support to solve parents' rearing problems,can reflect the upbringing needs of parents,and is conducive to improving the quality of early upbringing.Previous studies have shown that there are cross-cultural differences in parental rearing concepts.This study is based on an online question and answer community survey on the parental problems and needs of parents in China and the United States,as representatives of Chinese and Western cultures.This paper analyzes the characteristics of parental problems and needs and further explores whether there are differences in parental problems and demand characteristics between China and the United States.Using Internet text mining technology,the amount of data is 28639 and 8982,respectively,from parents' questions on two parent websites in China and the United States.Through the text clustering and classification method of machine learning,this paper makes a quantitative analysis of the child-rearing problems and needs,and draws the following conclusions:(1)The main parental problems and needs of parents in China and the United States are reflected in three aspects,namely,disease care,infant and child development and life care.Early childhood education and adoption are the characteristics of demand caused by differences in cultural and upbringing concepts.Both Chinese and American parents have the greatest demand for knowledge and skills in infant and child care,but with different emphasis,Chinese parents tend to prefer baby supplies.American parents,on the other hand,prefer toilet training in toilet problems.(2)Among the parents in China and the United States,the mother role has the largest number of questions,accounting for 86.3% and 45.5%,respectively.The mother role has higher parental needs than other upbringing roles,and the participation of American fathers in the process of raising children is higher than that of Chinese fathers.The demand of Chinese parents for parental problems is affected by the role of upbringing.Chinese mothers focus on life care,while Chinese fathers and grandparents have the highest demand for infant and child development.The degree of demand for parental problems in the United States is not affected by the role of correctional factors,and their demand for life care,disease care and infant and child development shows the same trend.(3)Parents in China and the United States have far more questions about low anxiety than high anxiety in the face of parental problems,indicating that parents need far more social support with substantial help than emotional support.Parents in China and the United States are more anxious about the development of infants and young children,especially in the field of language development.The anxiety of mother role is higher than that of other upbringing roles,and the anxiety of Chinese father is much higher than that of American father.(4)There are significant differences in the dimensions of child-rearing problems and demand categories between the parents of the two different cultural values.There are also significant differences in the degree of anxiety between Chinese and American parents.Chinese parents are more anxious about their upbringing needs,and they are also more likely to get help through online support to solve the child-rearing problem.