Chinese Family Culture: Change, Continuity, and Counseling Implications

Chinese Family Culture: Change, Continuity, and Counseling Implications enhances social sciences and counseling students' cultural understanding, sensitivity, and communication skills so they can provide competent and appropriate care for Chinese families around the world.

The text focuses on cultural and historical characteristics of Chinese families and features illustrative stories and examples to facilitate greater cultural understanding. Readers examine Chinese families from indigenous perspectives of lived experiences of Chinese individuals and their families. Chinese meanings of family life, such as marriage, sexuality, love, gender, reproduction, intergenerational relations, disability, and death, are covered.

Dedicated chapters explore cultural links between family collectivism, ancestor worship, and families' intimate relationship with the land; marriage's social role in expanding social networks and ensuring family continuity; the impact of China's one-child policy on reproductive behavior; the rule of rituals in handling family and clan disputes and conflict; illness and death in Chinese families; and more. Each chapter includes counseling implications to connect student learning with practice.

Chinese Family Culture is a timely and essential textbook for programs and courses in the social sciences and counseling.

Jiping Zuo is a professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Cloud State University. Her research interests include marital and gender equality, work and family, China, and socialism. Dr. Zuo is the author of Work and Family in Urban China: Women's Changing Experience since Mao.

Sylvester Amara Lamin holds a Ph.D., M.S.W., and a Certificate in AIDS education from The Ohio State University College of Social Work. He is a core associate professor in the M.S.W. Program at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Dr. Lamin's research interests include law enforcement, community policing, communities and organizations, and macro social work.