Shadow education in the service of tiger parenting: Strategies used by middle-class families in China

Parents in many cultures invest significant proportions of household incomes in the so-called shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring. Parts of the literature attribute intensive tutoring to East Asian cultural traditions and to so-called tiger parenting. Based on a mixed-methods study in Shanghai, this article examines tiger parenting through a socio-economic lens to show the roles of shadow education in achieving parental goals. The study shows that tiger parenting is most evident in middle-class families. In order to transmit or increase social advantages inter-generationally, such parents use private tutoring to prepare their children for successful academic trajectories in mainstream education. The strategy is driven by anxieties related to social status in the rapidly changing risk economy. Shadow education has provided parents with new means to increase family cultural capital which not only facilitates school performance but also reinforces class dispositions. The study highlights the importance of understanding tiger parenting in the culture of class, in addition to other cultural factors. It challenges the simplistic attribution of tiger parenting to Confucianism by revealing dimensions that run counter to the Confucian conception and tradition of parenting. It also extends the conceptualization of family cultural capital by unpacking the processes of tutoring as externalized parenting in the era of global expansion of shadow education.