Teresa Kuan's Love's Uncertainty certainly gives a good and interesting account of the challenges of child rearing—or at least aspects of it and for some segments of the population. But it is both more and less than a book about child rearing in China today.
First (and more importantly), Kuan analyzes the dilemmas of child rearing among middle-class (upper middle-class?) mothers in Kunming in a sophisticated, insightful way, so that we learn much more than the stories of these mothers and their challenges. Kuan argues, “in China, child rearing is both a private and a political matter” (p. 7), and she does an excellent job of connecting the difficulties of contemporary Chinese parenting with larger societal issues. Kuan uses her ethnographic research to document the ways mothers are torn between making sure their (one) child is happy and balanced and pushing their child to be successful and well-placed in a...