Residual and emergent: Good mother ideals in China and the role of cultural values

Objective

The study aimed to explore how different groups of people perceive good mother ideals in China and the cultural and sociodemographic profiles of these groups.

Background

Good mother ideals have changed over time and become increasingly complex. The prevalence of intensive mothering has been supported mainly by media representation research and dominated by Western-focused studies. How tensions between Confucianism and neoliberalism alter the good mother ideas in contemporary China requires further investigation.

Method

First, we used an open-ended survey to collect good mother attributes. Then, we conducted a latent profile analysis with an online survey (N = 449) to divide people into subgroups according to their latent perception structures. Later, we ran multinominal logistic regressions to explore whether cultural values and sociodemographic variables can predict group membership.

Results

Collected attributes (N = 1,162) were organized into five categories: neutrality (37.87%), femininity (25.39%), motherhood (11.53%), family responsibilities (6.71%), and childcare responsibilities (18.5%). Moreover, we identified three groups holding different motherhood beliefs: Whatever, Average, and Perfectionist. Young people had higher odds to be in the Whatever group and held more flexible good mother ideals, and married women were 6.69 times more likely to be in the Perfectionist group than single men. Our findings also indicated that people in the Perfectionist group scored higher on attitudes toward family and Asian values.

Conclusion

Our research suggested that researchers must distinguish between dominant motherhood representation and lay perceptions of motherhood as well as pay attention to the cultural sensitivity of good mother ideals.