Children's Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China

This book analyses parental anxieties about their children's healthcare issues in urban China, engaging with wider theoretical debates about modernity, risk and anxiety. It examines the broader social, cultural and historical contexts of parental anxiety by analysing a series of socio-economic changes and population policy changes in post-reform China that contextualise parental experiences. Drawing on Wilkinson's (2001) conceptualisation linking individual's risk consciousness to anxiety, this book analyses the situated risk experiences of parents' and grandparents', looking particularly into their engagement with various types of media. It studies the representations of health issues and health-related risks in a parenting magazine, popular newspapers, commercial advertising and new media, as well as parents' and grandparents' engagement with and response to these media representations. By investigating 'a culture of anxiety' among parents and grandparents in contemporary China, this book seeks to add to the scholarship of contemporary parenthood in a non- Western context. 

Qian (Sarah) Gong is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. Her recent research interests include health communication, risk, parenting and motherhood. She is currently the Principal investigator of a Wellcome Trust funded project Health communication for Chinese migrant mothers in Northern England.