Healing or Concealing: Educational Anxiety, Reflexivity, and Alternative Parenting Strategies

Amid the intensifying phenomenon of educational “involution,” parental anxiety regarding education has become a widespread social issue, prompting parents to engage in reflection and adjust their educational strategies accordingly. This paper, framed by Archer’s reflexivity theory, employs the method of digital ethnography to examine the reflexive educational strategies of parents within a family education consultation WeChat group, with a particular focus on how parents help their children cope with academic and psychological crises. The study explores how parental anxiety shifts and transforms during the process of strategy adjustment, whether it manifests as resolution or concealment. The findings reveal that parental anxiety is characterized by fluidity and variability, rather than a fixed emotional state. Middle-class parents’ educational strategies exhibit a high degree of dynamism and contextual dependence, as different situational mechanisms trigger varying forms of reflexivity, including fractured reflexivity, communicative reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity, and meta-reflexivity. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the dual nature of educational anxiety: non-constructive responses may lead to self-imposed constraints, while constructive responses can help parents navigate the challenges of “involution” and explore diverse educational pathways. This research provides a new perspective on the socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary educational anxiety, highlighting the complex interplay between anxiety and educational strategies.