The Privileged Path: Live-in-Home Tutors and Cultural Capital Transmission in Affluent Chinese Families

• In Event: Intensive Parenting Across Cultures: Global Varieties in Mobilizing Cultural Capital

Abstract

This research is situated in the aftermath of the Double Reduction Policy, which restricts access to conventional forms of shadow education and has prompted families to seek embedded, full-time educational support within the home (Lyu & Lam, 2025; Yang et al., 2024). In response, an increasing number of affluent Chinese families are hiring live-in-home tutors as a new strategy for supporting their children’s development. Unlike traditional private tutors (Bray, 2022), these live-in-home tutors reside with the family and engage in children’s daily routines, influencing academic performance, values, habits, and behaviors. Despite growing media and public attention (Ma, 2021), scholarly research on this topic remains limited. Using a qualitative approach, this study investigates the kinds of cultural capital parents expect live-in-home tutors to instill in their children, and how these expectations reflect broader efforts to secure educational advantages in a rapidly evolving social environment.
The study is grounded in Bourdieu’s (1983, 1986) theory of cultural capital, focusing on its three forms—embodied, institutionalized, and objectified—as well as the concept of family habitus that influences their reproduction. Data were collected through 40 semi-structured interviews with 25 live-in-home tutors, 10 family members (parents and siblings), and 5 agency representatives, and were supplemented with artifacts such as live-in-home tutors’ schedules, children’s development plans, and over 100 live-in-home tutor recruitment advertisements.
Thematic coding produced three key findings:
First, live-in-home tutors serve as “educational butlers,” not only supporting children academically but also managing study plans, tracking performance, and orchestrating extracurricular engagement. These efforts aim to enhance children’s academic competitiveness through educational support, thereby enabling them to more effectively acquire educational credentials and accumulate institutionalized cultural capital.
Second, live-in-home tutors play a significant role in shaping children’s values, behaviors, and habits, modeling both traditional Confucian ideals and modern developmental goals, thereby serving as mediators of embodied cultural capital.
Third, in some families, the presence of a highly qualified live-in-home tutor serves a symbolic function, representing objectified cultural capital that conveys elite status and reinforces social legitimacy within aspirational upper-class circles.
Interestingly, while affluent families share access to financial resources, the study finds variation in how they prioritize these different forms of capital, challenging assumptions of homogeneity within the upper class. These patterns reflect what this study identifies as an “omnivorous security strategy”—a combination of middle-class educational anxieties, upper-class status signaling, and working-class adaptability. Such strategies are less about elite dominance and more about navigating perceived risks of downward mobility and maintaining social standing in a competitive and uncertain environment.
This research contributes to broader conversations about educational inequality by illuminating how private, home-based educational practices interact with structural forces such as policy change, marketization, and class differentiation (Ball, 2003; Lan, 2018; Vincent & Ball, 2007). By focusing on an emerging but under-examined form of shadow education, this study offers new insights into the micro-dynamics of class reproduction in non-Western contexts. Ultimately, the research calls for greater attention to how privatized, personalized educational arrangements, while seemingly individualized, are embedded in broader systems of educational inequality.

Authors

• Lu Liu, University of Liverpool

• Lixin Ren, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University