Transnational families and their children's education: China's 'study mothers' in Singapore

Educational Mobility and the Gendered Geography of Cultural Capital: The Case of International Student Flows between Central Asia and the UK

“…Our intention is not to throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater, as our review above (Jöns, 2011) and transnational educational strategies from the perspectives of parents (e.g. Huang and Yeoh's (2005) work on the 'sacrificial' role of mothers who accompany their children to study in Singapore (see also Waters, 2002)). However, while the twenty-first century has seen rapidly increasing academic recognition of the gendered nature of migration (Bastia et al, 2011;Yeoh et al, 2000), there is a striking silence in geographical writing on the gendering of educational mobility from the perspective of undergraduate students, and it is this lacuna which this paper seeks to fill.…”

“…This value placed on children's success, when coupled with the massification of higher education and highly competitive local education systems where failure to perform extremely well limits children's progress into the best universities and jobs, is leading increasing numbers of middle-class Asian families to educate their children abroad. Educating children overseas both removes their offspring from the (potential) risk of failure in the local education system, and helps them acquire additional cultural capital, not least through the development of their English language skills (Huang and Yeoh, 2005;Waters, 2006b). The process has often relied on transnational family strategies where so called 'astronaut' or 'seagull' fathers remain in Asia in order to exploit economic opportunities which will support their families, but 'study' or 'kirogi' mothers move overseas with their children to support their education.…”

“…2 In the school sector, education has been conceived in the geographical and wider literature as a key 'project' for middle-class Asian families (Huang and Yeoh, 2005).…”

“…This paper focuses on one facet this internationalisation, namely the growth in student mobility between East and West over the past three decades. Existing research shows that changing socio-economic circumstances which place pressure on middle-class social reproduction in East Asia have been a key stimulus to growth (Huang and Yeoh, 2005;Lee H, 2010;Waters, 2006a;Xiang and Shen, 2009). In the face of challenges to families' ability to pass class status on from one generation to another, middle-class students and their parents are increasingly using overseas educational qualifications -an institutionalised form of cultural capital -to ensure they stand out from the crowd in the competition for lucrative employment opportunities and associated lifestyles.…”

Chinese one-child families in the age of migration: middle-class transnational mobility, ageing parents, and the changing role of filial piety

“…This migration included the phenomenon of the "astronaut family", where one parent accompanied the child to the host country while the other parent (usually the father) stayed in the home country to earn money and travelled regularly between his family and work (Tsong and Liu 2009;Huang and Yeoh 2005;Ong 2003). Similarly, widely used terms like "Pacific shuttle" and "parachute kids" (Ley 2010;Tsang et al 2003;Zhou 1998) also reflected an education-motivated, child-centred trans-Pacific migration arrangement.…”