Self or children? Navigating intensive mothering ideology and maternal agency for rural-to-urban migrant working mothers in China
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalent norm of motherhood in contemporary societies is intensive mothering, which is child-centred. As a result, mothers are characterized positively only when they sacrifice unconditionally for their children. Chinese rural-to-urban migrant working mothers (RUMWMs) are low-class working mothers who must relocate for higher wages because of their living circumstances and are forced to leave their children behind. This leads to difficulty in achieving the ideal image of a good mother. This article draws on in-depth interviews with 31 RUMWMs in China to examine whether their responses to the ideology of intensive mothering (in both thoughts and actions) are self-focused or child-oriented. The findings suggest that these mothers’ tactics fit into one of four categories. Most of the mothers’ responses demonstrate their maternal agency as they boldly redefine competent mothering in their own ways. This article provides an agency-oriented perspective on how lower-class mothers redefine or negotiate the dominant mainstream intensive mothering ideology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it