Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This study finds that the way educational care is organised in Chinese urban middle-class families intensifies gender inequalities in the family, though some of the inequalities can be offset by mobilising grandparental educational care through the daughter-centred intergenerational contract.

Paper long abstract:

In today’s China, marked by low fertility, population ageing, limited state welfare provision and social risks, and an increasingly competitive economy, family relations are characterised by what Yan (2018) refers to as neofamilism. With the “4-2-1 family” structure becoming more common, and the quest for social mobility, intergenerational relations have become increasingly child-centred, characterized by a downward flow of emotional and material resources to raise the “perfect child”. This study examines the contours of educational care and asks how it relates to gender and intergenerational relations in urban middle-class China. Based on fieldwork in Beijing it finds that intense educational care is a hallmark of good and responsible mothering, creating dilemmas when mothers reconcile their own and their children's priorities and needs. Rather than mobilising fathers to share educational care work, intensive mothering ideals motivate women to mobilise their own mothers as educational caregivers. Fathers' call for less intense educational care practices without active involvement effectively shifts the responsibility of educational care onto mothers. In particular siblingless mothers, whose own mother is an urbanite with an educational degree of her own, are able to benefit from grandparental educational care. For other mothers, withdrawing from the labour market is the only way to enable educational care according to the ideals of intensive mothering. As such, the daughter-centred intergenerational contract can be an important factor for reproducing urban middleclassness and maintaining gender equality in career prospects, while it may replace a more gender equal distribution of educational care.