The Emotional Work of Heritage Language Maintenance: Insights from a Longitudinal Study of Chinese–Canadian Bilingual Parenting

Abstract

Drawing on data from a three-year longitudinal study of 56 Chinese–Canadian families with early elementary school-aged children, this study explores Chinese immigrant parents’ lived-through emotional experiences of heritage language maintenance (HLM). Informed by Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie, thematic analysis of annual interview data reveals the mixed and refracted nature of parental emotions involved in Chinese language preservation and bilingual child-rearing. These emotional experiences were profoundly shaped by the intersection of environmental, personal, and situational factors and were deeply entangled with parents’ perceptions of and attitudes toward their children’s heritage language learning and use at home. The emotional work involved significantly influenced the parents’ language and literacy planning and HLM practices. By foregrounding the emotional dimensions of heritage language education, this study offers important implications for educational stakeholders seeking to support immigrant parents both emotionally and practically in raising bilingual children in the host country.

Emotion is a complex response involving thoughts, behaviors, and physical reactions that help people handle situations that matter to them (APA, n.d.). Although emotions are a natural part of being human (Ekman, 1992), they are not isolated—they are deeply shaped by a person’s social and cultural experiences and the environment in which they occur (Vygotsky, 1994). In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in research exploring the link between emotions and second language acquisition (SLA) (e.g., Derakhshan, 2022; Dewaele & Li, 2020; Plonsky et al., 2022; Simons & Smits, 2020). Researchers increasingly agree that emotion is not only central to thinking but also plays a key role in how people learn languages and what outcomes they achieve (Dewaele, 2010; Driver & Prada, 2024). This expanding field of study has influenced language teaching practices by highlighting the importance of emotional experiences and the well-being of both teachers and learners.

To date, the scholarship on language-related emotions has encompassed several intersecting strands of research, including (but not limited to) (1) language-related emotionality, i.e., how emotions tied specifically to the use of one language impact learners’ attitudes and identity (e.g., Ivaz et al., 2016; Moate & Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2017); (2) the influences of different emotions on second language developmental process and outcomes (e.g., Kushkiev, 2019; P. Wang et al., 2024); (3) the emotional experiences, management (or labor), and well-being of both teachers and students in second language learning classrooms (e.g., Ergün & Dewaele, 2021; Y. Wang et al., 2022); and (4) affective pedagogical approaches to SLA (e.g., Fan & Wang, 2022; Golombek & Doran, 2014). However, despite extensive research on the role of emotion in second language teaching and learning, relatively little research has examined the complex interplay between emotions and heritage language maintenance (HLM) within home and family contexts.

Heritage language maintenance within home and family contexts carries profound emotional weight, as it is intimately linked to individual and collective identities, cultural continuity, and intergenerational belonging. These connections often evoke a complex range of emotional responses—from pride in cultural heritage and hope for future transmission to anxiety over language loss and guilt about perceived shortcomings in passing the language on. Such emotions not only reflect families’ inner worlds but also actively shape their language ideologies, practices, and priorities. For many immigrant parents, supporting children’s heritage language development represents a deeply felt and emotionally charged endeavor, involving significant social, psychological, and relational complexities. While the importance of emotion in this process is increasingly acknowledged, relatively few studies have examined specific emotional experiences within particular ethnolinguistic and sociocultural contexts. Notable exceptions include research on Turkish–Dutch families’ language anxiety (Sevinç & Dewaele, 2018), Korean immigrants’ ambivalent emotional experiences with both heritage and majority languages in Australia (Jee, 2022), and moments of joy and playfulness in a Czech–English bilingual family in the United States (Cantas, 2024). These studies highlight the value of attending to the emotional dimensions of heritage language experiences, yet they also underscore the need for further nuanced, contextually grounded, and qualitatively rich investigations. In particular, more research is needed to explore how emotions intersect with broader sociocultural dynamics in shaping heritage language practices across diverse immigrant families.

To address this need, the present study contributes to the growing body of research on the emotional dimensions of heritage language maintenance by examining the nuanced, lived emotional experiences of Chinese–Canadian parents as they navigate Chinese language maintenance within an English-dominant societal context in Canada over a three-year period. To highlight the lived nature of their emotional experiences of HLM, the study adopts Vygotsky’s (1994) concept of perezhivanie, which refers to the way an individual experiences, interprets, and emotionally responds to a particular situation or environment, emphasizing how individuals live through it. That is, perezhivanie as a lived-through emotion is “a unity where on the one hand, the environment is represented, i.e., what is being experienced, and on the other hand, how it is being experienced” (Vygotsky, 1994, p. 339). Guided by this theoretical lens, the study will address two research questions:

• What are Chinese immigrant parents’ lived emotional experiences in HLM in Canada?
• How did these experiences influence their practices in HLM?

This study contributes to ongoing policy and pedagogical efforts to engage immigrant parents in authentic and meaningful ways by foregrounding the often-overlooked emotional labor involved in heritage language maintenance (HLM) within the home. By centering parents’ voices and lived experiences, the study affirms Chinese–Canadian immigrant families’ “parent knowledge” (Pushor, 2015) and underscores the need for more inclusive, emotionally responsive, and “familycentric” (Pushor, this issue) approaches to engaging parents as co-educators in their children’s bilingual development.

1. Emotions and Heritage Language Maintenance at Home

Recent scholarship has provided significant insights into how immigrant families plan for and support children’s bilingual development, with increasing recognition of the different emotional dimensions involved in the HLM process. Existing studies (e.g., Purkarthofer, 2020; Y. Wang, 2023; Y. Wang et al., 2023) revealed that emotions associated with HLM in the home context can be either positive (e.g., pride and a sense of accomplishment), negative (e.g., anxiety, irritation, guilt, loss, and insecurity), or mixed. However, for many immigrant families, negative emotions such as anxiety, irritation, guilt, loss, and insecurity are prevalent when it comes to HLM and supporting children’s bilingualism in host countries. For instance, in a study on Chinese language use and learning in 12 Chinese–Australian families, Y. Wang (2023) documented parents’ dissatisfaction, disappointment, and stress arising from discrepancies between children’s actual Chinese language performance and parental expectations. These negative emotions were largely triggered by the children’s resistance to Chinese language acquisition and parents’ perceived language attrition. Hilbig et al. (2024) also documented feelings of desperation and guilt among Lithuanian immigrant mothers in Europe, highlighting the challenges of disharmonious bilingual education at home. Rooted in sociocultural expectations that mothers are “responsible for and should aspire to” (p. 9) transmit the heritage language (HL), these women faced significant pressure when they struggled to fulfill this role. The collective value attached to the HL, combined with perceived failures to meet these expectations, imposed intense and prolonged emotional burdens. These overwhelming negative emotions often impaired the mothers’ ability to rationally assess their circumstances and take constructive steps to address challenges in intergenerational HL transmission. As a result, emotional strain within the mother–child relationship intensified, ultimately hindering children’s HL development.

Concerns about heritage language loss and children’s underperformance in heritage language can also evoke feelings of sadness, anxiety, blame, and insecurity among immigrant parents, contributing to emotional alienation from their ethnic roots. In studies conducted by Sevinç and her colleagues (Sevinç, 2020, 2022; Sevinç & Dewaele, 2018), anxiety was not only related to the acquisition and use of minority language (Turkish) but also extended to the majority language (Dutch) within Turkish immigrant families in the Netherlands. On one hand, members of different generations within the focal families continued to grapple with the pervasive normalization of Dutch proficiency in both mainstream society and educational institutions, where it was often positioned as a prerequisite for academic success and social mobility. This overwhelmingly Dutch-dominant environment facilitated Dutch language acquisition while simultaneously marginalizing Turkish language and culture, accelerating the intergenerational shift from Turkish to Dutch and generating anxiety and tensions around majority language acquisition and minority language erosion. On the other hand, Turkish immigrant families’ strong aspirations to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage were frequently undermined by inadequate support for Turkish language development both within and beyond the home. This misalignment between familial language maintenance goals and the dominant sociocultural norms further contributed to feelings of anxiety and blame regarding heritage language education and parenting. As Sevinç (2020, p. 99) observes, these negative emotions—particularly anxiety—were “ever-present and unavoidable,” permeating daily family interactions and shaped by broader socioeconomic and sociopolitical dynamics, including tensions and power imbalances between immigrant and native populations. These emotional undercurrents often led to shifts in parents’ language ideologies and practices, as they navigated competing expectations and linguistic pressures in both private and public spheres.

In a quantitative investigation on heritage language anxiety experienced across three generations of Korean immigrants in Australia, Jee (2022) found that the first-generation Korean immigrants experienced higher levels of anxiety when speaking English compared to the 1.5- and second generation. In contrast, members of the 1.5 and second generations of Korean–Australians reported anxiety related to their heritage language more frequently than their parents or grandparents. These findings align with Fishman’s generational model of language shift (Fishman, 1964, 1991, 2012), which provides a sociolinguistic framework for understanding the anxiety and identity loss often associated with the intergenerational transmission of heritage languages. This body of work underscores the emotional complexity inherent in bilingual development across generations. It highlights the need for more robust emotional and educational support systems to assist immigrant children in navigating the anxiety linked to heritage language use and maintenance.

Positive emotions have also been documented by a small group of studies (e.g., Cantas, 2024; Jo et al., 2023; Shen & Jiang, 2023; Song & Wu, 2024). In an autoethnographic study, Song and Wu (2024) explored the complex emotional dynamics surrounding Korean language maintenance within a Korean–American family, focusing on the shared experiences of a mother and daughter. The daughter’s confidence in using Korean, her positive attitude toward learning the language, and her embrace of a Korean or bilingual identity collectively provided the mother with a sense of relief. This emotional reassurance, in turn, motivated the mother to persist in her efforts to support her daughter’s heritage language development.

In another case study of three Chinese–Australian families, Shen and Jiang (2023) found that the heritage language, Chinese, served as an expression of love and an emotional bond across generations. The learning and use of Chinese within the home context fostered intimate communication and nurtured mutually positive feelings among family members, which in turn motivated the children to keep learning Chinese. Moreover, successful interactions with Chinese-speaking peers outside the home reinforced the children’s sense of pride in being Chinese–English bilingual, further strengthening their commitment to developing their Chinese language skills. Similarly, Cantas (2024), in a case study of a Czech–English family in the United States, illustrated how positive emotions associated with playful heritage language (HL) input could promote motivation and confidence in HL learning. Acknowledging their children’s preference for English, the parents strategically introduced Czech in child-centered and playful ways. These efforts stimulated positive emotional responses—such as enjoyment and desire—and contributed to the development of a more favorable attitude toward the heritage language.

Research (e.g., Haque, 2023; Sevinç, 2017; Smith-Christmas, 2018; Tang & Calafato, 2024) has shown that these emotions can either reinforce or undermine families’ language beliefs and ideologies of sustaining heritage languages and influence language decisions and management approaches, and ultimately shape language use and outcomes within the home contexts. For instance, Haque’s (2023) case study of five Indian and Laotian immigrant parents in Europe illustrated how both positive emotions—such as pride and joy—and negative emotions—such as fear, sadness, and helplessness—were deeply connected to underlying language ideologies. These ideologies framed heritage languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Arabic as markers of identity, symbols of familial bonds, and tools for transmitting cultural and religious traditions to the next generation. Notably, Haque found that positive emotions, such as pride and joy, played a pivotal role in reviving the Hindi language within an Indian family in France and the Urdu language within another Indian family in Norway. Conversely, negative emotions were consistently linked to parents’ perceptions of heritage language loss in their children. These findings demonstrate the power of emotions in language decisions and practices within these families.

In an ethnographic study of Chinese immigrant families in Australia, Y. Wang (2023) found that parents frequently experienced negative emotions—such as anxiety and stress—in relation to heritage language maintenance (HLM), particularly when there was a mismatch between their family language policy (FLP) implementation and their children’s Chinese language learning outcomes. Expanding on the emotional dimensions of HLM, Curdt-Christiansen and Iwaniec (2023) examined both online and offline emotional expressions—such as emojis, terms of endearment, diminutives, declarations of love, and context-specific emotive language use—in the everyday interactions of a Chinese immigrant family in the UK. Their analysis revealed a strong interconnection between emotions and parental perceptions of, as well as investment in, their children’s heritage language development. The study highlighted that Chinese, as the preferred language of emotional expression for both parents and children, facilitated the transmission of intimacy and affection across generations. This emotional resonance enabled children to adopt and adapt the language in meaningful ways, eventually integrating it into their habitual practices. These emotionally rich, Chinese-mediated interactions not only contributed to a solid foundation for continued Chinese language development but also reinforced FLP implicitly through what the authors describe as the construction of “familyness” (p. 176). These findings also contribute to the emerging dynamic model of family language policy (FLP) (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen & Huang, 2020), which positions emotions as an integral dimension of heritage language (HL) practices. Emotions are transmitted through HL use and interactions among family members and play a critical role in shaping the enactment and implementation of FLP.

Overall, recent scholarship has begun to illuminate the complex emotional terrain surrounding heritage language maintenance (HLM) within immigrant families, highlighting how emotions—both positive and negative—shape language ideologies and influence children’s language practices and identities. While this growing body of work has enriched our understanding of the emotional dynamics within family settings, it has largely concentrated on children’s emotional responses and the intersubjective emotional exchanges within the family. Little attention has been given to immigrant parents’ lived emotional experiences of navigating HLM and raising bilingual children abroad, especially from a dynamic and evolving perspective. In particular, few studies have examined how parents recognize, interpret, and reflect on the emotional intensities that arise in the context of HLM, or how these emotional and cognitive processes are shaped by sociocultural, linguistic, and relational factors, ultimately influencing their language practices and decisions. This study seeks to address that gap by foregrounding parents’ emotional lives as central to understanding the affective dimensions of HLM.

2. Understanding Chinese–Canadian Parents’ Lived Emotional Experiences in HLM Through Perezhivanie

Vygotsky’s (1994) concept of perezhivanie is central to understanding how individuals make meaning of emotionally significant experiences within specific sociocultural contexts. The term perezhivanie, derived from the Russian verb perezhivat, has no direct English equivalent but conveys the idea of experiencing, enduring, deeply reflecting on, and “consolidating on a dramatic leap forward” in an individual’s life (Blunden, 2016, p. 276). In Vygotskian theory, perezhivanie captures the unity of personal and environmental influences, highlighting how individuals subjectively interpret and emotionally respond to their circumstances. This means that development is not determined solely by external conditions, but rather by how those conditions are lived through and internalized by the individual. In the context of heritage language maintenance, perezhivanie offers a valuable lens for examining how emotional experiences—such as pride, anxiety, or guilt—mediate family language practices and shape intergenerational language transmission.

According to Cong-Lem (2025), there are three discernible meanings in Vygotsky’s (1994) conceptualization of perezhivanie. First, it emphasizes the external relation of the child or an individual to the environment or “one factor or another, of the reality” (p. 294), which enables researchers to explore the interconnectedness and mutual influences between the individuals’ emotional experiences and the environment they engage with. This relationship is not absolute but dynamic in that the child and the environment can change, and therefore they exert mutual influences in different ways. Second, Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie encompasses an individual’s attitude towards their environment and reflects a form of abstract/generalized experience of their holistic life situation (Cong-Lem, 2025). Focusing on abstract experience/perezhivanie allows researchers to understand how each individual under the same situation (or environment) may bring or develop “a different attitude to the situation” and to understand how the person “experiences the situation in a different way (Vygotsky, 1994, p. 241). A third meaning of Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie refers to a concrete lived experience of an event or situation. In this sense, an individual’s perezhivanie is composed of multiple “perezhivanija”—a series of emotionally charged, lived experiences—each of which evokes distinct emotional responses (Vygotsky, 1994, p. 339).

Cong-Lem (2025) posits that to unpack perezhivanie, researchers must attend to its three theoretical functions: the source mobilized in a person’s perezhivanie, its functioning mechanism, and its consequences. The source of a perezhivanie includes two critical components: the environment (the external conditions—the physical, social, and cultural context in which a person is situated) and the personal and situational characteristics (i.e., age, identity, past experiences, specific circumstances, etc.) which exist in unity and play a directing role in one’s perezhivanie. The mechanism Vygotsky (1994) describes as a refraction prism consists of three interrelated aspects: emotional awareness, cognitive processing or understanding of the lived emotional experience, and the capacity for generalization—that is, the ability to abstract meaning from specific emotional experiences and apply it to broader contexts or future situations. The consequences of a perezhivanie refer to the ways in which an individual’s subjective experience of a situation influences their psychological development and future actions. Because perezhivanie integrates emotional and cognitive processing, it can shape not only how a person perceives themselves and others, but also how they act in similar situations going forward. In this sense, perezhivanie serves as a developmental pivot, potentially leading to transformations in beliefs, decision-making processes, and practices.

Cong-Lem’s (2025) three theoretical functions of perezhivanie provide a framework for examining heritage language maintenance (HLM) by highlighting how parents emotionally and cognitively experience their environments and the influences of such experiences on HLM. Specifically, the environment, as it pertains to parents’ perezhivanie of HLM, includes the broader Canadian sociocultural context, local community dynamics, and the immediate familial setting in which Chinese immigrant families are situated. The personal and situational characteristics shaping these experiences involve factors such as the children’s varying ages, motivations, and attitudes toward HLM, as well as parents’ prior educational, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Additionally, these experiences are influenced by specific circumstances encountered by each family throughout the study. The refraction prism allowed us to examine the parents’ emotional awareness as they respond to their children’s engagement (or disengagement) with the heritage language, how they interpret and make sense of their HLM experiences, and how they make sense of these experiences and develop strategies and practices to better support their children’s bilingual development over time.

3. Method

The data in this qualitative study were derived from a government-funded, large-scale, longitudinal (2018–2024) research project on young Chinese–Canadian children’s bi/multilingual and academic development. This research program included over 200 Chinese immigrant families dwelling in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and other Chinese dialects) is the main non-official language spoken predominantly at home (Statistics Canada, 2021). The current study focused on data collected from 56 Chinese immigrant (32 Mandarin heritage and 24 Cantonese heritage) families who participated each year over a three-year period from 2019–2021.

Specifically, the data presented in this study consist of 168 yearly semi-structured interviews conducted with the same parent from each participating family over a three-year period. Only those parents who participated in all three waves of data collection were included in the analysis (see

Table 1. Demographic information of the parents.

Categories		Counts
Home Language	Mandarin	32
	Cantonese	24
Family SES	Low	3
	Non-low income	46
	N/A	7
Number of children	1	15
	2 or more	34
	N/A	7
Educational level	High school or lower	2
	Vocational	11
	Undergraduate and above	35
	N/A	8

Note. (1) N/A refers to those focal parents who chose not to disclose the relevant information about their families. (2) Family socioeconomic status (SES) was determined using the Hollingshead Four-Factor Index of Social Status (Hollingshead, 1975). Based on a maximum possible score of 48, families with scores below 16—representing the bottom third percentile—were categorized as low-SES.

for an overview of the focal parents’ demographic information). Each interview followed the protocol with inquiries about parental demographic backgrounds (e.g., socioeconomic status [SES], professionalism, and educational backgrounds), parental narrative experiences of living and raising children bilingually in the Canadian context, their perceptions of bi/multilingualism, as well as their language ideologies and practices regarding both majority and minority languages. Specifically, during the interviews, parents were repeatedly asked about their beliefs, attitudes, and feelings toward each language—English, the heritage language (HL), and any additional languages their children were learning. Questions such as “Which language do you think is the most important? Why?” and “As your child grows up, has your view on the importance of this language in their overseas learning and development changed? Why?” were used to probe evolving perspectives. Parents were also asked to rank the languages used in their home and to reflect on the rewards and challenges they experienced in supporting their children’s multilingual development abroad. These questions served to elicit parental language ideologies and perspectives on multilingualism. Each interview was conducted in the language chosen by the parent (either English, Mandarin, or Cantonese), lasted from 1 to 1.5 h, and was later transcribed verbatim for further analysis.

Parental interviews conducted each year were thematically analyzed using both inductive and deductive approaches. Initially, an inductive process was employed to identify parental emotions related to heritage language maintenance (HLM) through emotional coding (Miles et al., 2020). Emotion-laden words and phrases—such as worried, pleased, frustrated, helpless, and relaxed—were coded according to their emotional valence (negative, positive, or mixed), while the emotional undertones embedded in parental narratives were simultaneously recognized and coded. This process yielded 156 data segments reflecting parental emotions related to HLM (see

Table 2. Emotion-related and HLM-related data segment counts.

Positive	Counts	Negative	Counts	Mixed	Counts
Satisfaction	8	Anxiety	30	Relaxed and Surrender	1
Happiness/Joy	5	Helplessness	8	Irritation and Self-reflecting	1
Contentment	5	Guilt	2	Sense of Peace and Anxiety	6
Sense of peace/Relaxed	21	Disappointment	3
optimism	5	Frustration	12
Self-reflecting	9	Stress	9
		Irritation	28
		Surrender/Discouragement	3
Total	53		95		8

for a detailed breakdown of identified emotions). Subsequently, a deductive coding process was conducted, guided by the conceptual framework of perezhivanie. The larger data chunks that contain emotional words, phrases, and cues were then further coded to identify different dimensions in the perezhivanie model provided by Cong-Lem (2025): the sources, the prism, and consequences of perezhivanie.

Specifically, in the deductive coding process, parents’ mentions of contextual influences such as community (HL schools, local shops), society (Canada, mainstream schools), home, and peer groups (i.e., parents’ social groups) are coded as environmental sources. Parental statements on parent or child-related characteristics (e.g., children’s personalities, interests, or habits, their own experiences or backgrounds) were coded as personal characteristics. Special circumstances such as COVID-19, transnational travels, parental conflicts about HLM, or grandparents’ visits were coded as situational characteristics. Parents’ statements regarding their consciousness of their own or others’ emotions (e.g., “I know I am easily irritated”) were coded as “awareness”, the statements that refer to their understanding of the circumstances that triggered their emotions were coded as “cognition”; and statements about their developing new strategies or new understandings to regulate their emotions and actions were coded as “generalization”. Parents’ reports of actions taken, such as reducing Chinese class time, enrolling in HL schools, or enforcing a family language policy, are coded as “consequences”.

Table 3. Coding process, key categories, and example quotes.

First-Round Coding: Inductive and Emotional			Second-Round Coding: Deductive
Categories	Subcategories	Examples	Categories	Subcategories	Examples
Positive			The Source
	Relaxation	“…I didn’t particularly push them to learn Chinese…I’m rather laid-back.”		Environmental sources	“I turned to be relaxed as the broader environment [in China to Canada] has changed”
	Happiness	“I am super happy when he makes progress in Chinese learning.”		Personal characteristics	“In terms of progress, like we’re just pretty chill about it overall. I think as long as they’re like still interested, as long as they’re still picking up a few words here and there…we’re happy.”
	…			Situational characteristics	“I’m concerned that my daughter’s Mandarin is not good… (During the pandemic) we were all feeling down at home, and there wasn’t much focus on language exchange.”
Negative			The Prism
	Helplessness	“I often feel helpless and guilty as my children primarily have to rely on themselves [in Chinese learning].”		Awareness	“I know I am easily irritated”
	Anxiety	“I was anxious right from the start; he didn’t write a single Chinese character.”		Cognition	“I am quite relaxed [about her Chinese and overall learning…because we have already in Canada where has no more competitions than China…So I do not push her to learn.”
	…			Generalization	“Perhaps it’s also necessary to think from the perspective of Canada, that is, any issue has two sides and nothing special. It must be right or wrong. So sometimes, I can only adjust my own mindset and emotions”
Mixed			The Consequences
	Sense of Peace and Anxiety	“I have tried super hard to get myself and my child relaxed. I become relaxed than ever, but you know, I cannot be relaxed all the time.”		Actions taken	“I’m perfectly content as he could speak Cantonese and recognize some characters, that’s enough…I do not want to give him more pressures related to Chinese language learning…and I do not like homework, quizzes, or memorization tasks assigned by local HL schools, which I think will reduce his interests in Chinese learning.”

shows key categories emerging during the two rounds of coding and examples extracted from parents’ quotes.

Once these coding steps were completed, data were compared across the three years to identify trends and differences in parental emotions across the three years. This three-year visualization of data allowed us to identify key themes that were related to the first research question on Chinese immigrant parents’ lived emotional experiences in HLM over time. To understand the second research question on how these lived emotional experiences influence their practices in HLM, connections between their emotions and their practices in HLM were triangulated. Through the data analysis, several key findings emerged: (1) parents’ perezhivanie is mixed and refractive; (2) parents’ complex and refractive perezhivanie is shaped by intersecting environmental, personal, and situational factors; (3) parents’ perezhivanie profoundly shapes their HLM and parenting practices.

4. Mixed and Refractive Emotions: Chinese–Canadian Parents’ Lived Emotional Experiences in HLM

The interviews with 56 parents over the three years displayed a spectrum of emotions on HLM at home, and these lived-through emotional experiences regarding Chinese language preservation were influenced and configured by different environmental, personal, and situational factors, as well as parents’ perceptions and understandings of children’s Chinese competence and interest.

5. Chinese–Canadian Parents’ Mixed Emotions

Consistent with findings from previous studies (e.g., Jo et al., 2023; Sevinç, 2022; Y. Wang, 2023), the Chinese immigrant parents in this study expressed a range of both positive and negative emotions related to raising bilingual children and maintaining Chinese as a heritage language. When discussing their children’s Chinese language learning, many parents expressed positive emotions such as satisfaction, contentment, joy, happiness, and a sense of peace. However, they also frequently reported negative emotions, including anxiety, stress, irritation, disappointment, guilt, and helplessness. For example, Parent 100 described feeling “pleasantly surprised” and “quite good” when her son, seemingly out of the blue, felt comfortable enough to speak Mandarin with her and proudly shared that he could now initiate conversations with his Chinese-heritage peers at school. In contrast, Parent 154 took a more pragmatic stance, stating that she was “not at all worried about” her child’s Chinese learning and explained that this relaxed attitude stemmed from “facing reality”—acknowledging that it was unlikely her child would ever master writing Chinese characters or suddenly become proficient in the language.

However, for many other parents, such as Parents 30, 48, 64, and 127, the emotional journey was far less joyful. They reported significant challenges in maintaining their children’s heritage language in an English-dominant environment. Some expressed deep anxiety (焦虑) due to the limited access to Chinese language resources in Canada. Others became easily irritated (很凶) or experienced emotional pain (很痛苦) when their children’s Chinese learning outcomes fell short of their hopes. Frustration (很烦) was a frequent sentiment, and several parents described a profound sense of helplessness (无助) as their children exhibited increasing resistance to learning Chinese.

6. The Refractive Nature of Chinese–Canadian Parents’ Emotions over Time

Analyses of data across the three years revealed that many parents (e.g., Parents 11, 12, 15, 30, 44, 118, and 152) experienced ongoing shifts in their emotions, reflecting the refractive nature of parents’ emotions in HLM. These emotions were not static but evolved over time, reflecting the dynamic and contextually mediated nature of their perezhivanie—the lived-through emotional and cognitive experiences—related to heritage language maintenance (HLM). Importantly, the trajectories of emotional change varied from parent to parent and were often non-linear, marked by periods of frustration, hope, resignation, and renewal. For instance, as illustrated in

Table 4. Parent 11’s changing emotions on home HLM.

Year	Emotions	Quotes
2019	Dissatisfaction, Impatience, Anxiety	“I was anxious right from the start; he didn’t write a single Chinese character. I was anxious for a long time, and I felt it was unhelpful for me and more of a torment for him.”
2020	Confusion, Vexation, Introspection	“I don‘t know if leading him to learn Chinese can truly make him happy. Sometimes he feels unhappy because he thinks you are forcing him to learn things he doesn’t enjoy… It would be better to let him learn things he likes”
2021	Relaxed, Peaceful	“[There were] no successes or failures [in his Chinese learning]. We just approached it every day naturally. I would not be mad or something when he could not [learn it well]; I realize it has no meaning…” “Right now, I truly listen to him in terms of learning. We follow his interests, and for things he isn’t interested in, we just move around it or say we’ll come back to it later to see if he can accept it…”

Note. The quotations presented in the table reflect only the emotions parents expressed at the time of the interview.

, Parent 11 demonstrated a gradual upward shift in her emotional stance toward HLM over the course of three years. In her first-year interview, she voiced dissatisfaction with her son’s limited progress in Chinese, admitting that she would quickly lose her temper whenever he failed to engage seriously with character recognition and writing. However, by the third year, her perspective had noticeably softened. She described feeling more relaxed and accepting, reflecting, “There were no successes or failures [in his Chinese learning]. We just approached it every day naturally. I would not be mad or something when he could not [learn it well].” Other parents, such as Parent 44 and Parent 152, also shared emotional journeys marked by ongoing negotiation and re-evaluation. For some of them, moments of disappointment and helplessness eventually gave way to greater patience and resilience, while for others, lingering anxiety over their children’s disengagement from HL learning remained a persistent emotional undercurrent. These shifting emotional landscapes underscore how emotionality captures the deeply personal, evolving interplay between parents’ emotions, expectations, and the sociocultural realities of raising bilingual children in an English-dominant context.

In contrast to Parent 11’s gradual shift toward relaxation and acceptance in HLM, Parent 144 experienced an almost opposite emotional trajectory over the same three-year period (see

Table 5. Parent 144’s changing emotions over the three years.

Year	Emotions	Quotes
2019	Relaxed, Satisfied	“I think my home educational environment is more relaxed than most Chinese families I know. I feel home educational style is stricter than mine…” “I think their progress in Chinese learning is okay. You have to understand that it’s quite difficult for them to learn Chinese in Canada. But now they can recognize a lot of characters. Be slow and steady is fine.”
2020	Worried, Depressed	“My children grow up here. Thus, I’m quite worried about their Chinese development… I’m concerned that my daughter’s Mandarin is not good… (During the pandemic) we were all feeling down at home, and there wasn’t much focus on language exchange.”
2021	Helpless, Resigned	but I feel like the play is excessive…and (children here) really have no homework at all…Their third-grade peers in China already have a lot of things to learn and write. They have a cousin who is about the same age and can write over a hundred Chinese characters every day… I feel that since I don’t understand (language education and parenting) and I don’t have enough money to let my children learn more, I can only trust the teachers (in mainstream and HL schools).”

Note. The quotations presented in the table reflect only the emotions parents expressed at the time of the interview.

). In the first year, she expressed a sense of satisfaction and pride in her child’s progress with Chinese language learning, feeling confident about their bilingual development. However, her emotional outlook changed dramatically after the second year. The isolation policies during the COVID-19 pandemic brought significant strain to family life, leading to emotional distress and reduced communication among family members. As a result, Parent 144 grew increasingly anxious, worrying that her child’s Chinese language development was falling behind that of their peers from other Chinese-heritage families. This worry deepened over time and gradually gave way to feelings of helplessness and resignation. By the third year, she admitted that she no longer felt capable of supporting her child’s Chinese learning, saying she did not “understand [language education and parenting]” and lacked the financial means to provide additional resources or tutoring. Her emotions vividly illustrate how external disruptions and internal insecurities can reshape parents’ emotional experiences of HLM—transforming initial optimism into discouragement and surrender.

7. Sources That Trigger Chinese Immigrant Parents’ Emotions Regarding HLM

The evolving emotionality of Chinese immigrant parents regarding heritage language maintenance (HLM) and bilingual child-rearing was deeply influenced by a combination of environmental, personal, and situational factors. These elements shaped how parents emotionally navigated the challenges of raising bilingual children in an English-dominant society, coloring their perceptions, interpretations, and responses to the complexities of HLM. Four key factors emerged as central to their emotions: (1) societal factors such as the pressure of assimilation from the dominant society; (2) community factors, such as the availability and quality of local Chinese language education and Chinese literacy resources; (3) child-related factors, such as children’s emotional responses to Chinese learning, progress, and resistance or acceptance; and (4) parental and familial factors, including shifting attitudes toward Chinese language and culture, and efforts to maintain motivation in supporting their children’s language development. These factors collectively shaped the emotional and practical experiences of parents as they strived to preserve linguistic and cultural ties while adapting to life in a new sociocultural context.

Pressure from the dominant Canadian environment, which continuously challenged their values, practices, and assumptions, was one factor that shaped their emotions, as parents had to frequently reassess their goals and redefine their roles in supporting heritage language maintenance in response to these pressures. For instance, Parent 154’s emotionality was marked by a growing emotional determination to preserve Chinese language and cultural traditions in the face of what he perceived as a gradual erosion of heritage values. Confronted with the norms and expectations of Canadian society, he became increasingly concerned about the potential attrition of both language and culture among his children. This worry, though rooted in love and cultural pride, added a layer of emotional urgency to his efforts, demonstrating how deeply intertwined parental emotions were with both personal convictions and external sociocultural forces. He elaborated,

It’s very annoying. During these Chinese traditional festivals…I’m a bit worried that they don’t understand Chinese culture at all. In basic Chinese traditions, there is a strong emphasis on respect for teachers and elders; I am your parent, not your peer, and you should give me basic respect. Do you know that Canadian children are more individualistic and prioritize themselves, which is why they can call their parents by their first names? Although that’s not bad, I still hope to maintain the basic respect for teachers and elders.

The availability and quality of community resources also influence parents’ emotions. For example, Parent 38 spoke candidly about her growing concern over the quality of Chinese language instruction available in her community. Initially hopeful about enrolling her children in a local heritage language school, her optimism faded upon discovering that many teachers lacked professional training or credentials in language education. Her anxiety crystallized into doubt and frustration, which she voiced through a rhetorical question laden with concern: “How can I enroll my children in a Chinese language class with such unprofessional Chinese teachers?” Her emotions in HLM reflected not only her disappointment but also her growing sense of vulnerability in navigating an unfamiliar educational environment.

Similarly, Parent 67, who had recently immigrated to Canada, described a deep sense of helplessness rooted in the lack of access to Chinese language-learning resources. With few tools or support systems available, she felt unprepared and inadequate in her role as a linguistic guide for her children. Reflecting on her experience, she admitted, “My knowledge about (teaching) Chinese language restricts me…[and] we are not able to provide my children with good [Chinese language learning] resources.” Her emotionality was marked by emotional strain and self-blame, illustrating how structural limitations intersected with internalized expectations of parental responsibility.

The findings also revealed that children’s progress in and attitudes to learning Chinese—whether expressed explicitly or sensed implicitly—often stirred their parents’ emotions, creating a vivid emotional rollercoaster that intertwined with the children’s language-learning journey. Moments of radiant joy and proud delight were frequently followed by episodes of anger, sadness, and growing frustration, underscoring the depth of parents’ emotional investment in heritage language maintenance. For example, Parent 140 admitted that she would easily lose her temper whenever she saw her daughter struggle to write Chinese characters properly. In contrast, Parent 38 described feeling “super happiness” upon discovering, through a simple diary entry, that her son had developed a genuine interest in learning Chinese. These emotional highs and lows were not only reactions to their children’s performance but also reflections of the parents’ evolving emotions—their emotionally charged and meaning-laden experiences of navigating HLM in a transnational context.

Another case in point is Parent 40, who beamed with joy and happiness when reflecting on her son’s growing interest and improvement in Chinese language learning. She shared with enthusiasm, “My husband and I are very happy…He will go and check out [everything written in Chinese], which means he has already taken the first step that I expected him to take, right?” Her emotionality was marked by contentment and pride in her son’s progress, which led to a more patient and understanding approach to his occasional slow progress. She observed, “He will read Xi You Ji [Journey to the West]1, a relatively challenging book for him… I can see that he can read it without relying on Pinyin, but you know, he cannot understand every word in the book, as they are so complicated [for him].” Her reflections exemplified how positive emotions, tied to her son’s growth in language learning, fostered a sense of hope and patience in her approach to bilingual parenting.

8. Refractions of Parental Emotions

Parental emotional expressions across the three years of interviews revealed how parents not only perceived and interpreted environmental and child-related influences on their emotions related to HLM but also how they became increasingly aware of the emotional dynamics within their households. For example, Parent 49’s experience with HLM was tinged with constant tension and emotional strain, particularly due to ideological conflicts with her husband over language choices and practices at home. She described the English-only communication between her husband and daughter at home, noting that “both of them had already forgot many Chinese words.” She explained, “My husband believes that learning English well is important in Canada… and he is very opposed to me speaking Chinese to the children,” sharing the stress caused by their ongoing conflicts. These differing beliefs generated a sense of pressure that shaped her emotional experience of heritage language maintenance (HLM) at home, marked by unease and anxiety.

Similarly, Parent 112 also recognized emotional differences between him and his wife regarding bilingual child-rearing. While his wife “easily got super anxious and frustrated” and often quarreled with the children as she pushed them to complete their homework, he maintained a more relaxed, laid-back approach. He attributed this relaxed attitude to a conscious decision to avoid the tension he saw in his wife’s more rigid expectations, thus reflecting a more emotionally balanced stance toward bilingual parenting.

However, not all parents who recognized the emotional challenges of HLM were able to overcome them. Parent 54, in her Year-3 interview, reflected on her ongoing struggles in balancing bilingual education with emotional well-being. She admitted that she could not “be relaxed enough” or find “appropriate approaches” to raise her children bilingually without continuously experiencing negative emotions such as worry, anxiety, tension, and helplessness. She expressed a sense of resignation, observing how other parents seemed to “be in control of everything,” while she felt as though she was “playing the bad guy” in her approach to educating her child. She described how she would initially try to be patient, only to quickly revert to a “bad attitude” when her children made her lose patience. Despite repeatedly enforcing rules, she felt as if her efforts were futile: “It seemed useless.” This emotional cycle illustrated how emotionality can become a profound internal struggle, where parents’ good intentions collided with persistent emotional setbacks, leading to feelings of frustration and inadequacy.

9. The Consequences of Parents’ Emotions on HL Planning and Practices

The data revealed that Chinese parents’ emotional responses to heritage language maintenance (HLM) carried significant personal consequences, often surfacing as inner conflict, guilt, frustration, or resignation. These complex emotions were deeply entangled with their perceptions of, and attitudes toward, teaching and using the heritage language at home. Far from being passive reactions, these emotions actively shaped how parents thought about the role of the Chinese language in their children’s lives, often prompting a re-examination of their original intentions and reshaping their decisions and actions on HL planning and practices.

Parent 78’s story offers a poignant example of this emotional journey. In interviews, the mother reflected on her evolving approach to supporting her son’s Chinese learning, revealing a subtle but powerful emotional calculus. While she expressed no overt worry about his Chinese ability, she described feeling caught between her strong desire to preserve the language and her discomfort with the rigid, demanding pedagogical practices common in local HL schools. This tension created an emotional push-and-pull between wanting to maintain Chinese in the home and not wanting to make her son resent the language through pressure and rote learning. “I want him to enjoy it,” she explained, highlighting her growing awareness of the importance of maintaining the precarious balance between “keeping [her son’s] interest in Chinese” and “pushing [him to learn Chinese] hard”.

These emotional tensions ultimately led to decisive changes in her family’s HL practices. She gradually let go of earlier expectations for her son to become fully literate in Chinese and instead prioritized his enthusiasm. “I’m perfectly content,” she said, noting with acceptance that as long as her son “could speak Cantonese and recognize some characters, that’s enough.” Acting on this shift, she avoided exerting “more pressures related to Chinese language learning” and withdrew him from formal HL classes and intentionally avoided assigning him additional Chinese homework, quizzes, or memorization tasks. By the third year of interviews, the family’s home language environment had “become more English-oriented”, with an estimated “70:30 English-to-Chinese ratio”. They had no plans to return to Chinese classes or tutoring and had lifted any strict rules about Chinese use at home. Her emotional struggles had not only reshaped her expectations for her son’s heritage language learning but also guided her toward gradually giving up on HLM and family language planning and practices.

For some parents, emotional tensions surrounding HLM did not simply dissipate over time but continued to generate deep internal and relational conflicts. Parents like 44 and 100 grappled with persistent feelings of anxiety, stress, anguish, and guilt as they confronted the practical and emotional challenges of sustaining HL use at home. These negative emotions became pivotal forces that reshaped not only their language planning but also their overall parenting approaches.

Parent 44’s experience illustrates how early passion for HLM can be worn down by emotional strain and family discord. In the first year of interviews, she was resolute in her belief that speaking Cantonese was non-negotiable, “a must-do” in the household. Driven by this conviction, she enrolled her children in multiple Chinese language classes and enforced a strict “Chinese-only” rule at home. Yet, over time, her emotional investment in HLM began to erode. The root of this shift lay in growing friction with her husband, who did not share the same urgency about language preservation and felt that she was placing undue pressure on their children. By the third year, she reflected with visible resignation on how these tensions had affected not only her children but also her marriage. “Not only did the parent-child relationship change,” she remarked, “but also the relationship between me and my husband. He always thought I put too much pressure on the children.” Faced with the emotional cost of sustained conflict, she made the difficult decision to relinquish her strict language rules, saying, “I gave up being a ‘tiger mum’ [in Chinese learning].”

A similar emotional tug-of-war shaped Parent 100’s evolving language strategy. She, too, encountered disagreements with her spouse over how much emphasis to place on maintaining Cantonese. She shared, “My husband and I have conflicts in whether to maintain Cantonese for children, and he always thinks I am too harsh.” While her husband believed that “children should be given more play time than Chinese language learning”, she remained concerned about the long-term consequences of diminished HL proficiency. Torn between these competing priorities, she described feeling emotionally conflicted: “If I let children play, I would feel guilty. I was in a contradiction.” The emotional burden of this ambivalence eventually led her to modify her HLM expectations and practices—she relaxed the rigid “Chinese-only at home” policy and instead adopted a more flexible bilingual approach, allowing both English and Chinese to coexist in the household. These mothers’ stories demonstrate the significant consequences of emotions in HLM, which have compelled parents to recalibrate their HL goals and change their family language practices in favor of preserving familial harmony and emotional well-being.

10. Conclusions and Implications

The study explored different Chinese immigrant parents’ perezhivanie, or their lived emotional experiences, during HLM and bilingual child-rearing in the Canadian context. The varying and continually shifting emotional expressions exhibited by parents regarding HLM over the three-year period exemplify the complex, dynamic, and evolving nature of their HL-related emotional experiences. These fluctuations also highlight the event-specific perezhivanie, as conceptualized by Vygotsky (1994), who described it as a “less stable” and “concrete” phenomenon that is intricately shaped by specific social situations (p. 343). This perspective underscores the notion that parents’ emotional responses to HLM are not fixed but are instead contingent upon particular environmental, social, and situational factors, thus emphasizing the temporally and contextually nuanced characteristics of their emotional engagement with HL education and retention.

In this study, several environmental influences were found to shape and mobilize parental emotionality—their emotionally charged lived experiences related to heritage language maintenance. These influences included the broader English-dominant societal context, the availability and quality of home literacy resources, the emotional and behavioral responses of children toward the heritage language, and parents’ own situational and familial circumstances. These findings partially align with earlier research on bi/multilingual development and family language policy (FLP), which—either explicitly or implicitly—highlight the dynamic interplay between environmental factors, individuals’ emotional experiences with a language, and the practices that evolve around those emotions (cf. Busch, 2017; Lanza, 2021). This study adds further nuance by showing how emotional experiences are not merely personal reactions but are actively shaped by social contexts and, in turn, influence parents’ decisions and strategies regarding HL use in the home.

Findings also highlighted that Chinese immigrant parents’ emotions acted as a dynamic, non-linear, and ongoing emotional and cognitive developmental process through which the parents became aware of, interpreted, and responded to the emotions derived from HLM experiences. Consistent with prior studies (e.g., Babaeff, 2016; Cantas, 2024; Vorobeva & Leontjev, 2023), Chinese immigrant parents in this study were engaged in constant reflection on their emotions during HLM, learning from their perezhivanie, yet these lived-through, HLM-related emotional experiences are more negative than positive and often fraught with struggle, tensions, and negotiation. Such struggles and tensions, described as “dramatic experiences” by scholars who postulated perezhivanie as “dramatic events” (Lantolf & Swain, 2019; Veresov, 2017; Vygotsky, 1971), provided a condition for parental emotionality, catalyzed the development of parental emotions, and ultimately impacted their practices concerning HLM.

In addition, findings highlighted the influences of parental lived emotional experiences on the family’s planning and practices of HLM. Some Chinese immigrant parents, overwhelmed by the negative emotions elicited by external pressures, internal conflicts, and emotional fatigue, eventually gave up their efforts to maintain their children’s Chinese language skills. This echoed earlier research on factors that impacted the home biliteracy environment for HLM (e.g., Li et al., 2023) and the implementation of FLP regarding HL within immigrant families (e.g., Idaryani & Fidyati, 2022; Liang & Shin, 2021; Lee, 2021; Y. Wang, 2023), which documented similar patterns of parents resigning in HLM when encountering and failing to overcome challenges within and outside of home contexts. The findings also emphasized the importance of recognizing emotionality as vital in understanding language maintenance and attrition among immigrant families, suggesting an urgent call for future explorations to address the emotional dimensions of home HLM and FLP in order to sustain parents’ efforts and practices in maintaining HL for children and to promote their resilience in coping with negative emotions and challenges during HLM.

The findings of this study offer significant implications for policymakers, immigrant parents, and educators to better integrate “parent knowledge” in children’s biliteracy development in the home contexts (Pushor, 2015). Specifically, policymakers should take on the responsibility of developing “familycentric” social environments that are supportive and conducive to HL maintenance by effectively allocating resources to programs that facilitate immigrant families’ involvement in HLM and emotional well-being. Except for HL acquisition, funding initiatives should address the emotional dimensions of heritage language and culture transmission between generations, improving resilience and positive emotional experiences for both parents and children during HLM. Also, integrating HLs into broader multicultural and integration policies can help elevate HLs’ status within the official bilingual framework and foster societal recognition of linguistic diversity, which further eases immigrant families’ ongoing anxiety and pressures regarding HL maintenance in mainstream society.

Moreover, for educators from mainstream schools, building trust and empathy with immigrant parents is crucial for supporting HL preservation. Mainstream schoolteachers should acknowledge “parent knowledge” (Pushor, 2015) and emotional investment in their children’s language and identity development, valuing parental involvement as the core productive power for HL maintenance. In addition, creating familycentric spaces for immigrant parents to share their stories and for school–family dialogues about maintaining HL can strengthen parental engagement in supporting children’s bilingualism and help build an inclusive, collaborative environment that values cultural and linguistic diversity. Similarly, as the vital nodes of supporting immigrant families and their HL maintenance, local communities and HL schools can establish support groups or dedicated spaces where parents and guardians can exchange experiences about bilingual child-rearing overseas and offer mutual emotional support. Such peer exchanges and encouragement enable immigrant parents to validate the complex emotional landscape that accompanies language maintenance, acknowledging feelings of pride, frustration, sadness, or hope as natural components of the HLM process. Teachers at HL schools need to acknowledge parents as co-educators and emotional partners in HL education, highlighting the importance of adopting a holistic perspective on language education—one that considers emotional well-being as integral to HL proficiency and cultural transmission.

Additionally, immigrant parents need to share and frequently reflect on their own parental knowledge and emotional experiences related to HL maintenance and child-rearing in their host countries, which may help maintain their emotional well-being. In addition, parents can actively connect with other parents facing similar situations related to HLM in order to create a valuable support network, alleviate emotional isolation, and learn from each other in navigating challenges encountered during HL education. Most importantly, parents must learn to extend compassion toward themselves and recognize that heritage language education is, at its core, deeply emotional work. Embracing this understanding can foster sustained motivation and resilience, allowing parents to cultivate emotionally supportive home language environments that nurture both their own well-being and their children’s positive engagement with the heritage language over time.

Finally, although this study aims to deepen understanding of the emotional dimensions of heritage language maintenance (HLM) within immigrant families by examining Chinese–Canadian parents’ HLM-related emotional experiences and the societal and contextual factors shaping parental emotionality, it remains limited by its scope and research design. Future research should include other key family members—such as children and grandparents—to investigate and compare the range and patterns of HLM-related emotions experienced across generations. Such studies could further explore how specific emotions are transmitted within families or evolve at different stages of the HLM process. Additionally, incorporating quantitative data to measure the frequency and intensity of these emotions would enhance knowledge of their occurrence and fluctuation over time.