Becoming a Good Mother: Experiences of motherhood in the Early Years of Childrearing in Urban China

This thesis focuses on exploring what constitutes a ‘good mother’ from the perspective of Chinese middle-class heterosexual mothers. The aim of this thesis is to fill in gaps in sociological understanding of motherhood from the Chinese social and cultural context. In addition, this thesis will discuss motherhood and the role as a ‘good mother’ not only from mothers themselves, but also from angles of children’s education, intergenerational relationship, marriage and gender. Participants’ understandings of what it means to be a ‘good mother’ are explored through four analytic chapters, which address children’s education, intergenerational negotiations around child-care, husbands’ participation in child-rearing, and the understandings of gender that women are seeking to pass on to their own children. By focussing on mothering in the early years of childhood in China from these angles, this thesis offers a detailed analysis of what 'good mothering' means in everyday life in middle class urban China, and the practises through which it is accomplished. The focus on everyday practises of mothering provides rich insights into the ways in which the accomplishment of mothering is simultaneously about the negotiation of gender and intergenerational relationships. My analysis provides an analysis of what the 'intensification' of motherhood looks like in a context which is often conceptualised as less individualised. The analysis of this thesis highlights the complexity of motherhood in this context, and the ways in which aspects that are apparently more relational can themselves become part of the process of intensification. In addition, my findings also demonstrate women's awareness of the intensive pressures on a mother’s role and the ways in which they are bound up with limited understandings of gender. Collectively, these insights both provide important empirical detail about motherhood in contemporary China and offer useful perspectives to contribute to broader sociological analysis of parenting cultures.