Care and Control Revisited: Parent–Youth Co-residence and the Negotiation of Adulthood in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Parent–youth co-residence has become a growing trend worldwide. In Hong Kong, the cultural practice of ‘guan’ – an entangled form of parental care and control – presents a valuable case to study young adults’ lives in co-residence. Drawing on data from 24 semi-structured interviews with young people, this study analyzes how guan has four co-existing dimensions where acts of kindness and restriction occur and overlap. This is particularly present in key areas of life, marriage and sexuality, and personal finances. Findings show that young people may struggle with parents’ caring intervention into their personal lives on the one hand, and the enforced restrictions on behavior that are underlined by a duty of care on the other. Despite this, some young adults reveal nuanced sentiments, such as showing a sense of respect and duty for their parents despite this clashing with their autonomy. Children find ways to resist, fostering a semblance of autonomy. Building on guan, this study challenges the broader co-residence literature by approaching care and control as simultaneous actions, showing how such intertwined practices can contribute to understanding the uncharted experience of parental care in young adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-residence
• intergenerational relationships
• care and control
• Chinese families
• housing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The few local young adults in Hong Kong who do live on their own or in shared accommodation tend to be highly educated with previous overseas experience (Yip and Forrest 2014). In 2016, only 5.2% and 3% of young people between 25 and 34 years old lived alone or lived in a shared household, respectively (Census and Statistic Department 2016).

2 Much like their international counterparts, young people in Hong Kong face challenges to leave home, the main one being historically high housing prices (Li 2014).

3 Cottingham’s (2016) insight on care and gender is relevant here and also applies to the concept of guan. Men and women may both have the capacity to care and control but the method of expression may differ, in that men take on different forms based on a father’s gendered location and different emotion norms to which men and women are held. In fact, Chao and Tseng (2002) find that Chinese mothers and fathers play very different and complementary roles, where fathers’ principal duties as economic providers tend to obscure the reality of most fathers’ caring practice or emotional connection with their children. As a result, attention has been paid on the way mothers develop very intense, emotional relationships with their children but fails to capture those that are seen between fathers and children (of different genders).

4 Wong’s (2021) study is one of the few works that explores the parental involvement among a group of community college students in Hong Kong using the concept of emotional capital, which reveals the ‘traces’ of guan on the way grown-up children cope with their major failure to get into university. She shows how parents of different classes may monitor their children’s academic progress with sentiments of anxiety, anger and disappointment, which may contradict and overlap with their own positive expectations and hope for their children’s future success. Still, ‘parents’ in Wong’s study are largely considered as an undifferentiated group although parents of both genders are shown to be involved in their children’s education in quite a clear way.