Self or children? Navigating intensive mothering ideology and maternal agency for rural-to-urban migrant working mothers in China
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".