Chinese ‘Study Mothers’ in Living Apart Together (LAT) Relationships: Educational Migration, Family Practices, and Gender Roles

Abstract

Chinese people have a long history of giving great weight to education. Under the one-child policy, Chinese parents usually spare no efforts to devote themselves to their child’s development. This study examines how the gendered experiences of Chinese ‘study mothers’ ( peidu mama) who accompany their children to study while living apart from their partner, has impacted upon their everyday practices of ‘doing’ family in the Chinese social, historical, and cultural contexts. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews, this article examines how family is culturally constructed and practised in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in China. For a woman, being a full-time study mother, even when it is at the cost of living separately from her partner and established career development, has been considered as a way to privilege ‘motherhood’ over ‘wifehood’. The dramatically opposite parenting roles reinforce and entrench the existing traditional gendered division of labour and gender hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society, which has a long tradition of patriarchal families within Confucian culture. This research suggests that family practices in the multi-local household setting are often closely implicated with practices of gender, class, mothering, and social norms. By focusing on these often-neglected groups, this study opens a new avenue to examining the diverse strategies employed by people in varied living arrangements, to negotiate gender roles and everyday family practices.

‘I’m not managing it; it’s managing me’: a qualitative investigation of Australian parents’ and carers’ alcohol consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Inductive codes were added by the lead author as coding progressed, in consultation with the research team. Following Morgan (2011; and others (Seymour, 2010;Qiu, 2020) who have adopted the family practices approach, the concepts of bodily density, spatial boundaries, emotion work, family gaze, and care and emotional responsibility were important for understanding the data and were directly used to structure the analysis at this stage, alongside description of family, alcohol and COVID-19 specific concepts, and challenges and practices drawn from the data that influenced self-identified aspects of drinking and family relations. Once interviews had been initially coded, a fine-grained analysis examined individual themes in depth, to identify important quotations, experiences, nuances and interconnections between themes.…”

Influences of Family Structure and Intimacy on Emotional Divorce: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

“…The negotiation of gender roles, educational migration, and family practices within the context of Chinese study mothers in living apart together (LAT) relationships has been examined, emphasizing the overlap between practices of intimacy and family practices in cultures that valorize families and intimacy (Qiu, 2019). The assessment of couple relationship standards in same-sex attracted adults has shed light on the interplay between couple bond and family responsibility, underscoring the multifaceted nature of intimacy within diverse family structures (Baker & Halford, 2019).…”