October 16, 2026

What does it mean to choose stay-at-home motherhood when that choice is shaped by migration, family expectations, and limited work options?

In “Options Within Constraints: Parenting Experiences of College-Educated Chinese Stay-at-Home Mothers in Singapore” (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2025), Associate Professor Zheng Mu (NUS Sociology and Anthropology & NUS Centre for Family and Population Research) examines how college-educated Chinese migrant mothers in Singapore understand and practise stay-at-home motherhood.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 36 college-educated Chinese stay-at-home mothers, the study explores how gender, class, and migration status intersect in shaping parenting decisions. Rather than presenting migrant women as either fully constrained or fully empowered, Mu shows how these mothers make choices within limits.

For many of the women interviewed, staying at home was not simply a free personal choice. Their migration status could limit access to employment, while previous work experience from China or elsewhere was not always valued in Singapore’s labour market. Limited access to extended family support also made childcare more difficult, especially compared with China, where grandparents often play a more active role in caring for children.

At the same time, Singapore also offered these mothers new possibilities. Some interviewees saw Singapore as a safer, more diverse, and more flexible environment for raising children. Distance from family and social expectations in China also gave them more room to make decisions about parenting without constant judgement from relatives or peers.

A central theme in the article is how these mothers reframed stay-at-home motherhood as meaningful and productive. Many drew on their educational backgrounds to approach parenting as a deliberate and skilled project. They planned their children’s schooling, language development, extracurricular activities, and emotional well-being carefully, often describing their role as strategic, future-oriented, and deeply involved.

The study also shows that these mothers did not always embrace narrow ideas of academic success. While they valued education, many wanted to move away from the intense pressure they associated with schooling in China. In Singapore, they saw more room to prioritise companionship, character development, emotional security, and holistic growth.

Mu describes this as a form of “options within constraints”. These women faced real limitations in employment, childcare, and gender expectations. Yet within these constraints, they actively constructed stay-at-home motherhood as a moral and purposeful form of labour, rather than a passive withdrawal from work.

By focusing on highly educated Chinese migrant mothers, the study complicates common understandings of stay-at-home motherhood. It shows that unpaid care work can be both constrained and agentic, shaped by structural inequalities but also by mothers’ own efforts to create value, security, and meaning for their families.

Read the article here.