A Cross-cultural Study Of Parent-adolescent Conflicts Management In Chinese And American Families

Positive parent-adolescent relationships provide the foundation for children’s learning. With parents’ sensitive, responsive, and predictable care, children develop the skills they need to survive the harsh competition in society. Parent-adolescent relationships have powerful effect on children’s emotional well-being, their problem-solving abilities, and future capacity for establishing relationships. Through these interactions, children learn skills they need to engage with others and to adapt to different environments. However, conflict is unavoidable in all types of relationships. Parent-adolescent relationship is not an exception, and the conflict between parents and adolescent is always regarded as a main source of familial distress and psychological maladjustment. Numerous studies have been conducted to examine the nature of family conflict and conflict resolution in American families. However, empirical researches on Chinese family conflicts and their resolutions are relatively limited.Based on Hofstede’s Value Dimensions and Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode of the styles of managing interpersonal conflict, and by the integration of the qualitative and quantitative research, this study focuses on the cultural impacts of the varying methods of parent-adolescent conflict resolution commonly used by Chinese and Americans, and makes a comprehensive comparison of the different conflict resolution styles commonly found in the two cultures. After analyzing the collected data, the researcher conducted interviews as a supplement to further analyze conflict resolution in the reality. It can be found that American families and Chinese families do have the distinct conflict resolving preferences. Furthermore, this study indicates that conflict styles are not exclusivelyunchanging and both American families and Chinese families may choose the conflict resolution of different culture flexibly.