Transmigrants’ insecurities and intensive parenting: a case study of middle-class Chinese immigrants in Singapore

• In Event: The interplay of socio-cultural dynamics and school environments significantly impacts students' experiences and perceptions.

Proposal

This paper examines middle-class Chinese immigrants’ childrearing aspirations and strategies in Singapore. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 Chinese immigrant parents conducted in 2022, this paper looks at parenting in a transnational context from the conceptual lens of in/security. The paper examines the sources of immigrant parents’ insecurities and emotional anxieties under Singapore’s education and immigration regimes, and how these inform and structure their childrearing choices and practices. It argues that Chinese immigrant parents intensify their childrearing as a strategy not only to cope with the structural insecurities they face in the host society but also to respond to their perceived uncertainties in a rapidly changing world.

Specifically, in terms of structural insecurities, as first-generation immigrants, parents in the study lack language skills, social ties and cultural knowledge about the local education system. They also widely experience some degree of downward mobility in the workplace, which cause them to devote more time and energy to their children’s education and treat it as the most important security strategy of transnational class mobility for their families. The merit-based education system in Singapore, especially the current primary school admission policies that prioritize native-born Singaporeans, further adds to the Chinese parent’s sense of insecurity. Constrained by relatively exclusionary social networks in the host society, they rely on virtual and physical immigrant communities (e.g., WeChat group) to gain information, experiences and resources, which ironically encourage academic competition and intensify parental anxiety.

The study also finds that Chinese immigrant parents’ intensive parenting seem to be shaped by their hierarchical imaginaries of the global economy. Despite agreeing about Singapore being more cosmopolitan than most cities in China, Chinese immigrant parents in the study seem highly conscious of the vast world beyond the Southeast Asian city-state. Thus, in their parenting practices and strategies, they actively cultivate children’s bilingual and bicultural capacity by mobilizing transnational cultural capital, in the hope of keeping them ahead in a global landscape that seem set to be dominated by the West and China.

With these findings, this paper contributes to the scholarship on the cultural politics of intensive parenting. It also sheds new light on the relationship between immigrant integration and their parenting practices.

Author

• Peidong Yang, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore