Maternal Practices Of Rural Migrant Women And Intergenerational Occupational Mobility Of Their Children

Since the reform and opening up,more and more rural women have gone out to work,taking on a large amount of childcare labor in urban-rural mobility while expecting their children to achieve intergenerational mobility in occupational classes.Domestic gender research has mainly focused on the gender and class disadvantages of migrant women themselves,but less on their mothering practices to promote intergenerational mobility of their children.Based on the empirical materials collected from urban and rural migrant women surveys,this paper finds that under the shaping of social structure,family,market and gender culture,the mothering practices of post-70 s migrant women have undergone intergenerational changes,showing a tendency of "mimetic middle class",specifically in the form of subject-centeredness,conceptual extensification and behavioral intensification,while their children Their children have a tendency of intergenerational mobility or succession in career development.Firstly,through their mothering practices at different stages of their children’s career development,mobile women help their offspring to accomplish the corresponding developmental tasks,effectively facilitating intergenerational career mobility for some of their children.Second,they are also caught in multiple mothering dilemmas such as moral condemnation for the lack of childhood care for their children,powerlessness in career education,parent-child relationship tensions around differences in career perspectives,and high expectations and low commitment in career development,which may result in intergenerational career succession for some of their children.The paper further points out that under the current urban-rural dualistic structure,mobile women’s mothering practices play a dual role of oppression and protection for their children’s intergenerational career mobility.On the one hand,their expectations of their children’s careers create anxiety and pressure on both themselves and their children.On the other hand,when their children fail to achieve intergenerational mobility,mobile women usually adopt an accepting attitude,which is a kind of protection for themselves and their children.Therefore,from the perspective of social work professionals,this paper proposes services and policies to alleviate mobile women’s motherhood dilemmas and promote their children’s intergenerational career mobility.