Educate~ Vol.9, No.1, 2009, pp. 12-15 http://www.educatejournal.org/ 12 Research note Father-daughter relationships during girls’ adolescence in urban China by Qiong Xu (qxu@ioe.ac.uk ) Contextualization Contemporary Chinese families are experiencing tremendous changes, with the adoption of economic reform and the implementation of the one-child-per-family policy. These changes are inevitably leading to changing parent-child relationships in families, especially for girls’ relationships with their parents. However, family study is a very underdeveloped area in China, and existing Chinese family research has mostly been conducted in Hong Kong. There are reasons for expecting the Chinese experience to be very different. Abstract. The long history of Confucianism and Taoism in Chinese society gives both girls’ and fathers’ roles in Chinese families their own specific meanings. The paper is to research girls’ and fathers’ perceptions of father-daughter relationships among two cohorts of girls aged 13/14 and aged 16/17. It will seek to understand, from fathers’ and daughters’ perspectives, fathers’ influences on girls’ lives in the domains of education, work and career aspirations. In addition, how their relationships change across adolescent girls’ lives will also be explored. The study of father-child relationships which has been relatively neglected is now receiving more attention. However, most of this research has been on the impact of fathers on younger children, and mostly on boys. This study is aiming to provide a clearer picture of the father-daughter relationships in a changing society, by learning from studies which have been conducted in the west. Introduction Ever since the Chinese government introduced more pragmatic measures for social and economic reform, such as the open-door which was to promote foreign trade and economic investment (Howell, 1993) and population control policy “One Child Policy” introduced in 1979 which restricted the number of children married couple should have (Fong, 2004), China has been experiencing dramatic changes and the majority of Chinese people have enjoyed both social and economic benefits. As a result, with the vast expansion of western technologies and ideologies, Chinese families are facing rising conflicts as they move from a traditional lifestyle to a new way of living, with different opportunities and challenges. For example, most urban mothers no longer stay at home as housewives, going out to work instead. Women are expected to share more financial responsibilities with men, while men are expected to play a far more active role in the family, since domestic duties need to be shared when both are in waged work. These factors inevitably lead to changes in expectations and attitudes towards the roles of fathers and mothers. Another well-known change in China is the one-child policy that started in 1979, introduced to control the population. Several studies have revealed that this has had unintended consequences of narrowing gender biases against girls which are traditionally rooted in Confucianism (Laroche et al, 2007; Shek, 2006) in Chinese society, especially in the urban areas (Tsui and Rich, 2002; Liu, 2006; Veeck et al, 2003). A survey of 1040 high school students in Wuhan, a large city in central China, found that there were no gender differences related to educational attainment between single-girl and single-boy families (Tsui and Rich, 2002). Nowadays, since most families have only one child, parents may devote more care to