ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the patterns and dynamics of Chinese parents’ engagement practices in transition to school. The chapter uses multiple correspondence analysis to explore survey data collected from 274 parent questionnaires. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory, the study probes the correspondence between parental engagement and parental socioeconomic status measured through family income and parents’ occupation and educational qualification. For the surveyed parents, three different forms of habituses were found to engineer their engagement in children's transition to school. These are selective retreat, self-presence, and indifference. This finding challenges the monolithic notion of ‘parental habitus’ found in the literature that fails to capture the complex engagement patterns hidden behind the correspondence between parents’ positions and their dispositions. The chapter purposefully avoids using ‘class’—a highly contentious notion in the Chinese context. The chapter ends with a reflexive coda that proactively speaks to research on parenting in disrupted and disruptive contexts such as the global pandemic of COVID-19 raging across the globe at the time of writing.
