By Rui Jie Peng
Amid the global rise in women’s labor force participation and the decline in state childcare support, grandmothers frequently shoulder primary caregiving responsibilities. As many families are anxious to nurture globally competitive children, how do grandmothers navigate family and societal pressures to cope with intensive childrearing expectations?
Migrant families in China’s large-scale rural-to-urban migration provide a good case study for examining this question. There, migrant worker parents grapple with providing adequate child care amid precarious work conditions, constrained access to public education and healthcare, and the challenges of bringing their children tothe cities where they work due to household registration (hukou) rules. Meanwhile, the Chinese government emphasizes the importance of raising children with high suzhi—defined broadly as education, health, ethics, civic values, and global awareness—to strengthen the future labor force and advance the country’s economic prospects. Grandmothers frequently fill the gap.
Ethnic minority communities, like the Qiang in my study recently published in Gender & Society, exemplify additional challenges in meeting family and societal expectations for raising “modern,” “high-quality” children. While migrant parents struggle with precarious urban work, rural non-migrant grandmothers face mounting pressure to assume intensive childcare responsibilities. Yet, the state’s development and population strategies often stigmatize ethnic minorities, especially rural older women, as “backward” and “unmodern.” These stereotypes and the emphasis on children’s suzhi have exacerbated childrearing inequalities compared with urban Han families, constantly making rural Qiang grandmothers feel anxious and inadequate while they juggle agricultural work and intensive childrearing expectations.
In this context, Qiang grandmothers expressed a great deal of worry about the new childrearing demands. They nevertheless adapted localized childcare practices to cope with intensive childrearing expectations. Qiang grandmothers’ experience with China’s ethnicity-making processes, rural-urban class divides, and gendering and generational dynamics work together to shape their localized understanding of intensive childrearing expectations. Most of the older Qiang women feel pressure and anxiety when asked to raise “high-quality” grandchildren. Differentiating their child care from the past “rough” caregiving practices, they interpreted intensive grandmothering demands as promptly satisfying grandchildren’s needs, learning to use new technologies to strengthen grandchildren’s nutrition and health, and using specialized products to stimulate their intellectual and linguistic development. Despite being labeled “backward” and feeling inadequate, many grandmothers strategically prioritized agricultural work to create economic contributions in order to support migrant adults and keep the home fires burning.
Depending on household resources and migrant workers’ economic status, Qiang grandmothers used different strategies. While all of them recognized economic resources as the most reliable and direct means of supporting family members, women from better-off households were more susceptible to intensive grandmothering expectations because their families invested significantly in creating a nurturing environment comparable to urban Han families. Ironically, to enlist other family members’ help with the burdensome child care, they often invoked the “backward” stereotype that devalued their own care work. Underlying this tactic were genuine fears of their ineptitude in meeting the dominant standards of intensive childrearing. This tension highlights how cultivating children’s suzhi within the dominant discourse of modernization and development can further marginalize ethnic minority migrant households.
In contrast, Qiang grandmothers with limited resources often felt underequipped to care for their grandchildren according to dominant standards. Nevertheless, they were better positioned to prioritize economic contributions over intensive grandmothering, negotiating care responsibilities to best support their families in an unequal labor market. This group of grandmothers tried to resist dominant caregiving norms while maximizing care contributions. Despite ethnic marginalization and precarious labor conditions, they tried to assert their dignity by redefining what good grandmothering is.
Based on these findings, I develop the concept of “care circuits” to capture the gendered social relations, meaning-making processes, and economic and care activities within migrant households. The care circuit I identify reveals that, instead of following a straight downward direction, material resources and care flow from the grandmothers to their migrant adult children and grandchildren as the middle generation migrates to earn more money to invest in their offspring. However, when these grandmothers’ labor is undervalued, even as it essentially supports their household livelihoods, the care circuit they forge may reinforce the gendered and regionally unequal social development model that is sustaining rural-to-urban migration.
Care circuits can help us understand gender and generational relationships and negotiations around child care in the context of migration. This concept reveals how non-migrant older women sustain and enable migration by engaging in complex negotiations around resource and care exchanges. Uncovering this relational process offers a feminist critique of the traditional narrative in migration studies that portrays non-migrant women as passive recipients of remittances and dominant ideologies from urban centers.
Rui Jie Peng is an assistant professor of Sociology at Lafayette College. Her research examines how gender, ethnicity, migration, labor, development, and globalization interact and intersect to produce social inequalities. This article draws from her current project on the evolving resource exchanges, relationships, and interdependencies between migrants and their rural family members, highlighting the multi-faceted labor ethnic-minority Qiang women take up to sustain the social reproduction of labor in China’s rural-to-urban migration. For more information on her work, visit www.ruijiepeng.com.