Shaming is a culturally salient parenting and child socializing process used by Chinese and Chinese-American families. In shame, the self is experienced as flawed. Shaming has a negative connotation in Western Society; however in Chinese society, its value is immense and shame plays a significant role in moral development, social harmony, self-control, and in the fundamental development of the "self" in Chinese society (Bedford & Hwang, 2003Li, Wang, & Fischer, 2004; Wong, 2013).

First generation Chinese immigrant parents in the United States continue to raise their children using shame. Although shame is adaptive and woven into the underlying fabric of a Confucius informed Chinese society, it is not endorsed or widely used as a parenting practice in the United States. This leads to questions of whether parental shaming is appropriate and adaptive for 1.5 and 2nd generation Chinese-American offspring who grew up in the United States, and whether immigrant Chinese parents' well-intended use of shaming may have harmful implications for their offspring's development.

Eighty-two 1.5 and 2nd generation Chinese-American young adults completed measures that assessed their recollection of the extent of parental shaming experiences, their endorsement of shaming, and their self-esteem, and collective self-esteem levels.

Mothers' shaming practices were significantly negatively related to participants' self-esteem. Fathers' and mothers' shaming practices significantly predicted three of the four facets of collective self-esteem: feelings about Chinese-Americans, ethnic pride, and beliefs about others' views of Chinese-Americans. Shaming did not relate to the extent that being Chinese-American contributed to one's self-concept.

A possible design flaw in the study is the use of the EMBU questionnaire to measure participants' recollection of their parental shaming experiences, because this measure may take a more Western, individualistic view of shame. In addition, there are validity and methodological concerns with this researcher's self-created endorsement of shaming questionnaire. As a result, the impact of participant's endorsement of parental shaming on the relationship between extent of parental shaming and self-esteem and collective self-esteem could not be examined effectively. These and other limitations are discussed.