Planning School Transition Through Relational Influence in Chinese Families: Adolescents’ Perspectives

Abstract

Building on the relational approaches, particularly social relational theory, this study investigates how Chinese adolescents plan their transition to post-compulsory education through relational influences between themselves and their parents. By examining the family and school lives of 25 Chinese adolescents from a small Chinese town, it has been found that they exercise their agency when negotiating their educational future with their parents. Their mixed agentic strategies are embedded in multiple parenting styles and they result in differing levels of agreement. Despite such variation, the adolescent–parent relationship is interpreted as the reliable interdependence across the participants. The findings provide new insights into parental influence on young Chinese people’s educational future and stress the value of the relational approach in studying the family–education nexus.