When the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child meets Confucianism: Chinese parents' understanding of children’s right to play

Abstract

This study employs a poststructuralist theoretical framework to explore parents’ attitudes towards children’s right to play in Shanghai, China. It adopted mixed methods of online questionnaires (N = 880) and semi-structured interviews (N = 11). The findings suggest that participants struggle with embracing and practising children’s right to play as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), reflecting culturally-sensitive and -contextualised concerns around their children’s future success. Those concerns are connected with the hegemony of Confucianism in shaping educational values in Chinese education. In the context of globalisation, this paper points to the empowerment of parents in practising children’s rights to play in China.