Bible is the source of hope: Christianity as a weapon of parenting for Chinese immigrant families in Australia

This chapter investigates the meaning of Christianity for parenting in the lives of recent Chinese immigrant parents as they did their utmost to perform parenting roles in the journey of settlement. Data were collected mainly through open-ended in-depth interviews with nine mothers and triangulated by private conversations, observations, and WeChat messaging. All the nine women were highly educated new immigrants from mainland China and had young children at the time of conversion. This ethnographic qualitative research has generated four major findings: (1) Religion has shaped the Chinese women’s parenting ideologies, transformed their parenting roles, and altered their parenting practices in Australia. (2) Biblical teachings, in replacement of a Chinese moral vocabulary, are employed as a mechanism for legitimating parental instructions and for guiding children’s moral behaviours. (3) The shared faith offers a discourse to resolve the linguistic, cultural, and ideological conflicts between Chinese immigrant parents and their Australian-grown children. (4) Church and its community are selectively employed as a resource facilitating parental middle-class aspirations for their children. The findings have many hopeful implications for psychosocial health of immigrant families, development of religious institutions, heritage language education, and home-school collaboration.