Valuation of Stay-at-Home Motherhood in the Era of Intensive Parenting

Stay-at-home mothers used to be equated to “housewives”, which term exclusively emphasized the domestic roles taken up by this group of women. Especially in the Chinese context, housewives (jia ting fu nv) are negatively depicted as lacking agency and power, making little contribution to society, and being disconnected from the changing world.

Given the rising emphasis on meritocracy and cultivating quality of children, modern parents are more concerned with their children's all-around growth and emotional value than parents in past generations were. Through reading, enrichment activities, talent development, and engaging company, intense parenting has gaining popularity. In this changing picture, mothers are often the main figures in practicing intensive parenting.

The fact that mothers, especially those with higher education and from families with established socioeconomic standing, should devote themselves to the cause of their children's education serves to exacerbate challenges in balancing work and family. Some women may even choose (willingly or reluctantly) to leave the workforce in order to concentrate on the upbringing and education of their children. Empirical findings based in China show that although the absolute levels of non-employment remained lower among college-educated mothers than their lower-educated counterparts, the likelihood of non-employment among college-educated mothers increased more steeply over time.

In this context, stay-at-home mothers are keen to have their contributions fairly valuated. Instead of “housewives”, “full-time mothers” (quan zhi ma ma) have been preferred to signify the professional and productive nature of such motherhood experience. In a qualitative study based in Singapore, many college-educated stay-at-home mothers from China have been proactive in maximizing the productive value of their motherhood. Some emphasized the importance of their prior educational and professional experiences as capitals for the education and development of their children; others utilized their motherhood experiences to spark future career ideas and get professionally prepared through certification, language training, degree attainment, and part-time jobs or interim episodes of employment; some also proactively engaged their husbands in parenthood and household responsibilities when possible to have their contributions to the family fully appreciated.

Of course, it is far from rosy yet. Most informants from the aforementioned study lamented that the gendered expectation for parenting is hard to change and has been perpetuated by the social stigma attached to stay-at-home fathers. The convention of hypergam and gender inequality of the labor force, in the face of the demand of intensive parenting, rather than having mothers opted out, pushed them out.

Further readings:

Mu, Z. (2023). Valuation of Domestic Work: Construction of Stay-at-Home Motherhood among Elite Chinese Migrants in Singapore. Population Association of Singapore annual meeting.

Mu, Z., & Hu, S. (2023). Unequal childhoods in China: Parental education and children's time use. Journal of Community Psychology, 51(2), 695-723.

Mu, Z., & Tian, F. F. (2022). The Changing Patterns and Determinants of Stay-at-Home Motherhood in Urban China, 1982 to 2015. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 53(1), 48-75.