“Only Mother Is the Best in the World”: Maternal Guilt, Migrant Motherhood, and Changing Ideologies of Childrearing in China

ABSTRACT

China’s childrearing culture has undergone dramatic transformations in recent decades, redefining ideals of childrearing in ways that relegate rural-to-urban migrant mothers to a marginalized position. This article explores the repercussions of changing childrearing ideologies in China on the subjectivities of rural migrant mothers through a critical inquiry into their expressions of maternal guilt. Based on interviews with 24 migrant mothers who voiced profound guilt for leaving their children behind, this study uncovers the intersectional oppressive power of three intertwined childrearing ideologies – traditional gender beliefs, the “left-behind children” discourse, and the urban middle-class parenting model. These ideologies, firmly grounded in but also articulated with institutionalized marginalization based on gender, hukou status, and class, frame migrant mothers’ childcare as aberrant and subject them to guilt and self-blame. Integrating Althusser’s concept of interpellation and the theory of intersectionality, this study contributes to the expanding literature of Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication (CIFC) research.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the migrant mothers who participated in this research for sharing their life experiences and Hua Su and Corinna Laughlin for providing feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. The author is also grateful to the journal editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on the article. An earlier version of this paper received the Top Paper Award from the Family Communication Division at the 2021 National Communication Association conference in Seattle, Washington.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Ma is a participant of this study.

2. “Only Mother is the Best in the World” (shishang zhiyou mamahao) is the theme song of the Taiwanese film My Beloved (mama zai aiwo yici), which portrays the coerced separation and eventual reunion of a mother and a son. The film was enormously popular in mainland China in the early 1990s, and the song’s lyrics, “Only mother is the best in the world, a child with her mother is as precious as a gem…Only mother is the best in the world, a child without her mother is as lonely as a blade of grass,” are widely known.

3. All mothers interviewed in this study gave birth after the implementation of China’s one-child policy in 1979 but before its repeal in 2016. During this period, rural families were allowed to have a second child if the first child was a girl and it was not uncommon for rural parents to try to have a third child if the first two were girls despite potential punishment (see, Jankowiak & Moore, 2017; Shi, 2017).

4. The maternal guilt literature sometimes treats guilt and shame as separated but interrelated concepts (Liss et al., 2013; Sutherland, 2010), but they are often “used interchangeably in lay talk” (Constantinou et al., 2021, p. 856). Since my participants did not explicitly use words related to the Chinese notion of shame (diulian or xiuchi) to describe their maternal identities and comparing the cultural differences between Chinese and English concepts of guilt and shame is beyond the scope of this article, I follow others researchers (e.g., C. Collins, 2021) by using maternal guilt to describe migrant mothers’ negative self-evaluations without differentiating between guilt and shame.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Loyola Marymount University.