Accept the New Role: Ideologies of Self-Transformation and Gender Roles in Chinese Parenting Advice for Novice Fathers on Xiaohongshu

This study employs feminist critical discourse analysis to explore parenting advice for novice fathers on Xiaohongshu, a leading Chinese social media platform. The findings reveal that while the advice encourages greater paternal involvement in child-rearing, it paradoxically reinforces essentialist gender roles based on biological sex differences. It also remasculinizes and neoliberalizes involved fatherhood by framing it as a project of self-transformation, which contrasts with the assumption that mothers’ roles are inherently ‘given’—that is, treated as natural, self-evident, and unquestionable. This neoliberal conceptualization of involved fatherhood further individualizes paternal responsibilities, potentially obscuring real-life constraints on fathers.