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Dai Ping, whose son is a first grader in a primary school in Beijing, has noticed a growing number of higher educated stay-at-home mothers around her community. Currently, 11 children in her son’s 44-student class have stay-at-home mothers. Dai, a biology major, once worked at a research institute in the United States in the prime of her career before choosing to raise her son at home.
Haidian District, where Dai’s son goes to school, has a high density of higher learning institutions, research institutes and hi-tech companies. Like Dai, most of the parents at her son’s school have received a higher education from renowned universities.
Lu Jing quit her job as an editor at a publishing group four years ago and returned to family life. Lu found that the number of students with stay-at-home mothers in her daughter’s class had spiked from only one four years ago to six now. After dropping their children off at school, the six mothers, some with postgraduate degrees, sometimes went to the gym or the shopping mall together.
While the rise of stay-at-home mothers is swift in China’s most first-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, as well as Guangzhou and Shenzhen in southern Guangdong Province, usually, the trend is less noticeable elsewhere.
Lin Yang, a stay-at-home mother in southwestern Chongqing, said that her son’s kindergarten class has more than 20 children, but only two mothers, including Lin, tend to their needs full time. Lin, who dropped out of the labor force several years ago, attributed career women’s reluctance to return to family life in Chongqing to the fact that more parents of young children are locals, with grandparents who can help with child rearing. Lin said that another reason is that people’s commuting trips are less time-consuming and jobs are usually less stressful than those in first-tier cities.
Motives
Stay-at-home mothers are a relatively new social group in China, first appearing in coastal cities during the 1990s where the economy registered the fastest growth nationwide. A survey on women’s social status conducted in Guangdong in 2000 indicated that about one quarter of career women were willing to quit their jobs and focus on family life if it was financially viable.
While the opportunity to watch their children grow up is a good enough reward for some women to leave work, some stay-at-home mothers feel forced to leave the workforce after failing to handle the stress of an exhausting job and motherhood.
Jiang Dan, a student of Changchun University of Technology in northeastern Jilin Province, wrote her master’s thesis on the study of full-time housewives in 2010. In her paper, she included a survey of 238 educated women and studied their attitudes toward the housewife lifestyle. A total of 192 respondents said that they would be willing to quit work. Among these respondents, mostly between the ages of 35 and 45, 150 said that they were struggling under the double pressure from career and family.
Lu, the former editor, told China Newsweek magazine that her most vivid memory about her breastfeeding days was holding her daughter in one hand and typing words into her laptop with another to meet a deadline. The first words her daughter learned to say were “Ms. Busy”—a nickname her husband often called her. Lu said that she eventually decided to quit her job after finding that exhaustion, insomnia, anxiety about her career prospects and guilt over ignoring her family were eating her up inside.
Among stay-at-home mothers, Lu is not alone in making her choice due to work pressure. According to a women’s lifestyle survey conducted by the Women of China magazine in 2011 on career women in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Ningbo in eastern Zhejiang Province and Taiyuan in northern Shanxi Province, their average daily working hours exceeded eight hours, with 85.3 percent of respondents reporting stress from work as a result of a lower-than-expected salary, peer competition and long working hours.
Part of this trend may be a reaction to the experience of these young parents’ own childhood, when they were latchkey children of parents who both worked. They want their own children to have a better childhood and home life than they did.
Starting from the early 1950s, the Chinese Government launched a campaign to encourage married women to work in order to reverse entrenched gender inequality. Government-subsidized daycare centers were established in factories and on farms so that mothers could devote themselves to a professional life.
Lu said that as a child, her mother, a farm worker, spent long hours picking cotton in the field. Lu was sent to a boarding kindergarten school and then transferred to a relative’s home. She attributes her high anxiety and a sense of insecurity to that time of separation from her family.
Lin—who said that her mother never allowed her to have long hair when she was growing up because of the hassle of combing it—hopes her childhood misery would not be repeated with her son. When quitting her job, she decided that China didn’t need an elite professional woman as much as her son needed a full-time mother. She told China Newsweek that her close relationship with her son has already paid off, because he is one of three best-performing kids in his kindergarten class. The other two are also being raised by stay-at-home mothers.
A national survey on women’s social status in 2010 revealed that nearly 62 percent of men and 55 percent of women believed that“men belong to public life while women belong to the family,” compared with 54 percent of men and 51 percent of women in 2000.
Nannies are also demanding more pay, leaving more professional women priced out of the job market.
Fang Ying, a lecturer at the Public Administration School of Guangzhou University, has been studying stay-at-home mothers as a social phenomenon since 2006. She told China Newsweek that before dropping out of the job market, these women tended to be at two ends of the pay scale: those holding high-income and demanding positions that leave almost no time and energy for motherhood, and those with dead-end low-income jobs whose families would be better off if mothers look after their children themselves rather than paying for childcare.
Before recently quitting her job at a software company, a woman surnamed Liu, who lives in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei Province, and gave birth to her child at the beginning of this year, earned a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan ($476). She told the locally published Chutian Gold News that she pays 300 yuan ($47.6) in commuting expenses, 300 yuan for lunch money and 2,000 yuan ($312) for a full-time nanny every month. “Keeping this job stopped being worthwhile,” she said.
Challenges
Being a stay-at-home mother is not without its challenges. These women also have to fight stereotypes that they are lazy and irresponsible for not providing additional income or that they sit around all day with ample time on their hands to do whatever they please.
Yu Jianghui, a 28-year-old mother of a 2-year-old, has been a housewife since graduating from college. She told the Chongqing Morning Post that between cooking three meals for her son and babysitting him all day long, her only “me” time is during her son’s two-hour afternoon nap.
“Professional women only have to give their best during the eight hours at work, while the role of a full-time caregiver keeps me busy every waking minute,” Yu said.
Cao Hongpei, a marriage counselor, said that stay-at-home mothers should also learn how to relax and maintain self-learning by finding a hobby, joining a religious group or participating in charity work, all of which can enhance their sense of happiness.
Women’s withdrawal from the workforce also brings financial stress on some families, especially middle-income ones. This pain is particularly acute for single-income families in China as income tax is levied on individuals rather than families.
Even worse, when stay-at-home mothers find their life boring or less useful to their children after they go to primary school, it is very difficult for them to return to their careers.
After leaving the workforce for six years, 30-year-old Yu Ma (a pseudonym), mother of a preschooler in Hangzhou, eastern Zhejiang Province, is desperate to return to her fashion designing career. However, she said that her paltry resume had landed her very few interview opportunities. “I feel more a professional in child care than in fashion. If I still cannot find a job, I plan to have a second child, which will buy me two more years to get professional certificates in designing,” Yu told the locally published Qianjiang Evening News.
Zhaopin.com, one of China’s leading job websites, conducted a survey on the career development of women of childbearing age. According to the survey, 82.36 percent of respondents believe it is difficult for stayat-home mothers to return to the job market while 26.07 percent believe the difficulty is overwhelming.
More and more stay-at-home mothers are running online stores because of the flexible working hours. Wang Qun, a stay-at-home mother with a master’s degree from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, has developed a hobby of making crafts together with her 3-year-old daughter into an online store selling homemade supplies, such as plasticine made of flour and food coloring.
“After all, I am bringing in extra money to make home life easier,” Wang said.
Haidian District, where Dai’s son goes to school, has a high density of higher learning institutions, research institutes and hi-tech companies. Like Dai, most of the parents at her son’s school have received a higher education from renowned universities.
Lu Jing quit her job as an editor at a publishing group four years ago and returned to family life. Lu found that the number of students with stay-at-home mothers in her daughter’s class had spiked from only one four years ago to six now. After dropping their children off at school, the six mothers, some with postgraduate degrees, sometimes went to the gym or the shopping mall together.
While the rise of stay-at-home mothers is swift in China’s most first-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, as well as Guangzhou and Shenzhen in southern Guangdong Province, usually, the trend is less noticeable elsewhere.
Lin Yang, a stay-at-home mother in southwestern Chongqing, said that her son’s kindergarten class has more than 20 children, but only two mothers, including Lin, tend to their needs full time. Lin, who dropped out of the labor force several years ago, attributed career women’s reluctance to return to family life in Chongqing to the fact that more parents of young children are locals, with grandparents who can help with child rearing. Lin said that another reason is that people’s commuting trips are less time-consuming and jobs are usually less stressful than those in first-tier cities.
Motives
Stay-at-home mothers are a relatively new social group in China, first appearing in coastal cities during the 1990s where the economy registered the fastest growth nationwide. A survey on women’s social status conducted in Guangdong in 2000 indicated that about one quarter of career women were willing to quit their jobs and focus on family life if it was financially viable.
While the opportunity to watch their children grow up is a good enough reward for some women to leave work, some stay-at-home mothers feel forced to leave the workforce after failing to handle the stress of an exhausting job and motherhood.
Jiang Dan, a student of Changchun University of Technology in northeastern Jilin Province, wrote her master’s thesis on the study of full-time housewives in 2010. In her paper, she included a survey of 238 educated women and studied their attitudes toward the housewife lifestyle. A total of 192 respondents said that they would be willing to quit work. Among these respondents, mostly between the ages of 35 and 45, 150 said that they were struggling under the double pressure from career and family.
Lu, the former editor, told China Newsweek magazine that her most vivid memory about her breastfeeding days was holding her daughter in one hand and typing words into her laptop with another to meet a deadline. The first words her daughter learned to say were “Ms. Busy”—a nickname her husband often called her. Lu said that she eventually decided to quit her job after finding that exhaustion, insomnia, anxiety about her career prospects and guilt over ignoring her family were eating her up inside.
Among stay-at-home mothers, Lu is not alone in making her choice due to work pressure. According to a women’s lifestyle survey conducted by the Women of China magazine in 2011 on career women in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Ningbo in eastern Zhejiang Province and Taiyuan in northern Shanxi Province, their average daily working hours exceeded eight hours, with 85.3 percent of respondents reporting stress from work as a result of a lower-than-expected salary, peer competition and long working hours.
Part of this trend may be a reaction to the experience of these young parents’ own childhood, when they were latchkey children of parents who both worked. They want their own children to have a better childhood and home life than they did.
Starting from the early 1950s, the Chinese Government launched a campaign to encourage married women to work in order to reverse entrenched gender inequality. Government-subsidized daycare centers were established in factories and on farms so that mothers could devote themselves to a professional life.
Lu said that as a child, her mother, a farm worker, spent long hours picking cotton in the field. Lu was sent to a boarding kindergarten school and then transferred to a relative’s home. She attributes her high anxiety and a sense of insecurity to that time of separation from her family.
Lin—who said that her mother never allowed her to have long hair when she was growing up because of the hassle of combing it—hopes her childhood misery would not be repeated with her son. When quitting her job, she decided that China didn’t need an elite professional woman as much as her son needed a full-time mother. She told China Newsweek that her close relationship with her son has already paid off, because he is one of three best-performing kids in his kindergarten class. The other two are also being raised by stay-at-home mothers.
A national survey on women’s social status in 2010 revealed that nearly 62 percent of men and 55 percent of women believed that“men belong to public life while women belong to the family,” compared with 54 percent of men and 51 percent of women in 2000.
Nannies are also demanding more pay, leaving more professional women priced out of the job market.
Fang Ying, a lecturer at the Public Administration School of Guangzhou University, has been studying stay-at-home mothers as a social phenomenon since 2006. She told China Newsweek that before dropping out of the job market, these women tended to be at two ends of the pay scale: those holding high-income and demanding positions that leave almost no time and energy for motherhood, and those with dead-end low-income jobs whose families would be better off if mothers look after their children themselves rather than paying for childcare.
Before recently quitting her job at a software company, a woman surnamed Liu, who lives in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei Province, and gave birth to her child at the beginning of this year, earned a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan ($476). She told the locally published Chutian Gold News that she pays 300 yuan ($47.6) in commuting expenses, 300 yuan for lunch money and 2,000 yuan ($312) for a full-time nanny every month. “Keeping this job stopped being worthwhile,” she said.
Challenges
Being a stay-at-home mother is not without its challenges. These women also have to fight stereotypes that they are lazy and irresponsible for not providing additional income or that they sit around all day with ample time on their hands to do whatever they please.
Yu Jianghui, a 28-year-old mother of a 2-year-old, has been a housewife since graduating from college. She told the Chongqing Morning Post that between cooking three meals for her son and babysitting him all day long, her only “me” time is during her son’s two-hour afternoon nap.
“Professional women only have to give their best during the eight hours at work, while the role of a full-time caregiver keeps me busy every waking minute,” Yu said.
Cao Hongpei, a marriage counselor, said that stay-at-home mothers should also learn how to relax and maintain self-learning by finding a hobby, joining a religious group or participating in charity work, all of which can enhance their sense of happiness.
Women’s withdrawal from the workforce also brings financial stress on some families, especially middle-income ones. This pain is particularly acute for single-income families in China as income tax is levied on individuals rather than families.
Even worse, when stay-at-home mothers find their life boring or less useful to their children after they go to primary school, it is very difficult for them to return to their careers.
After leaving the workforce for six years, 30-year-old Yu Ma (a pseudonym), mother of a preschooler in Hangzhou, eastern Zhejiang Province, is desperate to return to her fashion designing career. However, she said that her paltry resume had landed her very few interview opportunities. “I feel more a professional in child care than in fashion. If I still cannot find a job, I plan to have a second child, which will buy me two more years to get professional certificates in designing,” Yu told the locally published Qianjiang Evening News.
Zhaopin.com, one of China’s leading job websites, conducted a survey on the career development of women of childbearing age. According to the survey, 82.36 percent of respondents believe it is difficult for stayat-home mothers to return to the job market while 26.07 percent believe the difficulty is overwhelming.
More and more stay-at-home mothers are running online stores because of the flexible working hours. Wang Qun, a stay-at-home mother with a master’s degree from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, has developed a hobby of making crafts together with her 3-year-old daughter into an online store selling homemade supplies, such as plasticine made of flour and food coloring.
“After all, I am bringing in extra money to make home life easier,” Wang said.