| The present study is a qualitative study that explores the experiences and meanings of parental anxiety from the first-person perspective of parents. Whereas a burgeoning literature has attempted to account for the rise of parental anxiety in contemporary society and explore the effects of its concomitant intensive, anxious parenting approach, there is still a dearth of research which looks into the lived experiences and meanings of parental anxiety from the first-person perspectives of parents. Adopting the framework of social constructivism and narrative perspective, this study elicited the stories of lived experiences of parental anxiety of 18 parents (8 fathers and 10 mothers) and explored the experiences and meanings of parental anxiety embedded in their narratives through a meticulous process of narrative analysis. These parents are all Hong Kong Chinese parents whose parenting experiences are rooted deeply in Hong Kong, a highly modernized and globalized city where the rise of parental anxiety has aroused much public concern.;Analysis of parents' narratives revealed recurrent themes around the experiences and meanings of parental anxiety. Particularly, parents experienced their parental selves as ones fraught with doubts and confusion. They also constructed their children as concomitantly a project to work on and a problem for concern. Whereas parents were ambivalent about their encounters with the childrearing professionals, they were prone to see and judge their children through the eyes of the latter. In addition, parents painted a dim and gloomy picture for the place of Hong Kong, which was seen as risky, dangerous and competitive, with both physical and moral threats and perils to their children. Perceiving that the future of their children was at stake in their current performance in the academic system, parents hence felt a strong urge to fit themselves and their children into the system no matter how much they had to adjust their pace of life to get along with it. Taking their perceptions and experience as hard, objective reality, they also saw few, if not none, alternatives.;Notwithstanding this dim picture that parents painted for their experiences of parental anxiety, these parents had constructed various meanings for these experiences. Such meanings heightened parents' awareness of the existential significance of being a parent and highlighted the importance of the unique parent-child relationship. The first-person accounts of parents hence suggested that parental anxiety was not necessarily pathological. Rather, it imparted pivotal information about what it meant to be a parent and revealed significant aspects of parent-child relationships which were otherwise omitted in the third-person, expert-led conceptualizations of parenting prevalent in the dominant parenting literature.;Based on the research findings, this study discusses a number of related issues regarding the study of parenting and parental anxiety and makes recommendations for related practices, policies and research. |
