This article draws on a cultural-historical theorisation of child development alongside the Chinese concept of learning in order to study children's development in the Hong Kong Australian community in Melbourne, Australia. In particular, it aims to understand in detail how a 9-year-old child develops a learning motive under highly structured family practices. The data analysed were selected from a larger set of data involving 80 hours of video observations generated from the recording of everyday practices in three Hong Kong immigrant families. The findings indicate that encouragement plays an important role in bridging the gap between parental demands and the child's wishes, which assists the child to appropriate family values, thus facilitating the development of a learning motive and learning itself.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2011.634941]

This study aimed to compare the adaptation of two groups of migrant Chinese adolescents with their nonmigrant peers. The migrant adolescents included 55 Chinese migrant adolescents who migrated to Australia (Chinese-Australian) and 111 China-born adolescents who migrated to Hong Kong (Chinese-Hong Kong). The nonmigrant adolescents included 157 Anglo-Australian adolescents residing in Australia and 456 Hong Kong-born Chinese adolescents residing in Hong Kong. There were three research questions in this study. First, would there be any differences in the adaptation of Chinese migrant adolescents in different societies of settlement? Second, would migrant adolescents experience more adaptation problems than nonmigrant adolescents? Third, would there be any differences in the adaptation of adolescents in the two societies, Australia and Hong Kong? It was hypothesized that: (1) mainland Chinese migrant adolescents in Hong Kong would experience more adaptation problems than Chinese migrant adolescents in Australia; (2) migrant adolescents would report better adaptation than nonmigrant adolescents; (3) adolescents in Hong Kong would report poorer adaptation than adolescents in Australia. The participants were requested to complete a questionnaire on various adaptation outcome measures including life satisfaction, self-esteem, psychological symptoms, academic satisfaction, and behaviour problems. The results indicated that Chinese-Australian adolescents reported better psychological adaptation but Chinese-Hong Kong adolescents reported better sociocultural adaptation. Adolescents resident in Australia reported higher psychological adaptation but lower sociocultural adaptation than those in Hong Kong. Migrant adolescents reported better psychological and sociocultural adaptation than their nonmigrant counterparts. The results were discussed in relation to the social and educational systems of the two societies.
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