Disciplined Parenting Professionalism: FEPL, Changing Patterns of Power, Assumed Politics in Family Education

Abstract

Currently, parents are required to raise children following the law as new parenting professionalism in China. This article explores how the new Family Education Promotion Law (FEPL) creates new requirements for parents to cultivate future citizens by employing family educational science. It draws upon text and discourse analysis of bills of FEPL regarding educative parent performance law. Interweaving qualitative data with post-structural groundings, this article questions that it neglects the discussion about distinctions of educational knowledge in various family education contexts. Despite stipulation of responsibilities of parents and other guardians that underscores legality and authority of laws and regulations in order to create a suitable family education environment for children, its unexpected outcome is to include the ‘ideal’ parents and exclude others, based more on family educational science of child-rearing by neglecting the peculiar part of the culture and the produced discrimination to parents at the bottom. Moreover, we found that it produces a new decentralization trend and shifts the power among members in the education village.