Although the influence of Confucian values has waned in recent years, certain values such as clearly defined gender roles, responsibilities and obligations of the individual, children’s deference to parental authority, as well as reverence and respect for fathers still exerted a considerable influence on contemporary British Chinese parenting beliefs.
However in contrast to parents’ childhoods, less authoritarian family set-ups with open lines of communication between parent and child were also seen as an ideal parenting method for the modern age and during the time of adolescence.
For [the majority] of parents who accommodated and assimilated both Chinese and Western cultural norms, this was mainly due to the parents’ own negative childhood experiences [corporal punishment, perceived lack of interest on the part of parents in their children, little parental support, cultural alienation, out of bounds topics]. Interestingly, outright conflict in their own childhood was not often reported by parents, due to the moral and social norms stressing obedience, duty and loyalty as the essential qualities of a good son or daughter.
Parents more readily understood the need to be flexible in their cultural beliefs and parenting approaches, given the difficulties of being Chinese and living in the UK. They happily encouraged Chinese customs/traditions (eg food, chopsticks, etiquette, language, festivals, organizations) at the same time as they encouraged their children to step outside their ethnic group, to be more communicative, and to negotiate and to assert their choices (even though this then produced parent-child conflict).  Westernisation and a loss of Chinese culture and traditions was seen as inevitable. So parents can be seen as “bicultural”.
For a minority of children whose parents had poor English skills (mainly those from the catering trade and parents from newly migrated families), communication and personal relationships with parents suffered, as the children felt more eloquent in their English skills compared to their Chinese speaking abilities. The main reason behind the emphasis on children retaining their mother tongue was not culture so much as future career prospects, given China’s growing global position.
The way in which Chinese cultural norms can therefore be manipulated and overridden by parents, for personal, philosophical and pragmatic reasons, contradicts the findings of existing literature which suggest that Chinese traditions are highly prioritised over Western ideals by migrant families. Contemporary British Chinese parenting approaches should be seen as an interactive process, where individual and family experiences are created through, and are contingent upon, family practices within and outside of the home.