As competition for educational resources intensifies, parents, especially mothers, are increasingly involved in education in an attempt to give their children a head start in life. They usually devote large amounts of time and energy to chaperoning, tutoring, collecting educational information and interacting with schoolteachers. Some say that the success of a child’s education depends mostly on one’s mother, leading to a new buzzword in China “Pinma (competition of moms)” after the popular phrase “Pinba (competition of dads).”

Absence on father’s side

As competition among mothers becomes the norm, one may wonder how this affects the role of the father. According to the Third Survey of the Social Status of Chinese Women, 52.5 percent of working moms take on most or all of the responsibility for tutoring their children after school, while 16.4 percent of working dads reported involvement.

Empirical research shows that dads are not totally absent, but their involvement appears to be sporadic.

However, absence on the father’s side does not mean they do not care about or participate in their children’s education. They usually are only involved in crucial decisions, such as choosing schools, purchasing a school-nearby house with good quality education as well as filling out higher school applications.

When education becomes a family investment, a new gender division of labor forms in which the father is the decision-maker while the mom shoulders the more time-consuming day-to-day tasks of education intervention and course management.

The most popular, common sense explanation for such a division within a family unit is that a man needs to focus more on his career and support his family financially, leaving less time for participation in children’s education. Such a division is in fact based on the perception that men often earn higher incomes than women and have better prospects in the workplace.

Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker (1930-2014) once said a woman’s time may not be valued as much as that of a man.

Though the engagement of mothers and the absence of fathers may have an economic component, this state of things has led to an imbalance in education.

Spreading educational anxiety

Anxiety caused by education is spreading in China. According to a survey by people.cn, 92.8 percent of parents feel stressed when it comes to their children’s education, while mothers are a high-risk group. Quite a number of mothers exchange information and support one another through online communities, but these same forums are a means of spreading anxiety.

Is educational anxiety an individual or social behavior? What drives mothers “crazy?” First, the for-profit education industry encourages competition for high-quality educational resources, which intensifies this anxiety.

The education industry fills mothers with anxiety through such tactics as the much criticized but highly influential slogan “Don’t let your children lose at the starting line,” or an image advertising a “successful mother” who raises a Harvard graduate and advice from so-called educational experts. Education companies peddle the notion that as long as you are willing to pay, the market can provide all the solutions you need.

Second, individual anxiety is caused by the constant revision of what it means to be a “good mother.” Today, it is not enough for a mother to simply care for her children. More attention is paid to their capacity to teach children. The so-called competition of moms is not only a competition in terms of time and energy but also a competition in educational concepts and comprehensive resources.

There is a saying that an ideal mom should acquire dozens of skills. She should not only be a good homemaker but also be able to teach mathematics, English and Chinese, know how to play the piano and chess, and be good at calligraphy and drawing, etc. The bar for such an “all-round mother” is higher than that of the “super mom” created by the media in the post-industrial era in the West. Therefore, moms in China are all under a lot of pressure.

Competitive education

Parental competition in education is derived from the establishment of contest mobility and the emergence of a “parentocracy” in the era of globalization. The work of Bath University education professor Hugh Lauder and his peers concluded that the global social transformation in the 1970s had two tendencies: “globalization” and “individualization.” Globalization drives nation-states to develop into “Schumpeterian Competition State” while individualization breeds “competitive individuals.”

Within the context of fierce global competition, countries worry about maintaining global competitiveness, and ensuring educational effectiveness, even for the UK and the US, which are dominant in the field. For example, in 1983, US President Ronald Reagan commissioned a report on education titled “A Nation at Risk.” This national sense of crisis inextricably links education with market competition.

In addition, the rise of a knowledge economy further aggravates social differentiation based on education and social status competition based on academic degrees.

After the 1990s, China underwent dramatic social differentiation and the social structure gradually solidified, leading to diminishing opportunities for upward social mobility. If we agree that education can provide an institutional vehicle for social mobility, then it is not hard to imagine that families will invest in education to help children compete in a society where knowledge and skills are instrumental, this undoubtedly will make competition among individual families particularly cruel.

Influence of family capital

Some say that compared to competition of dads, competition of moms represents progress, because the former is indeed a competition of power and wealth, which is widely criticized as detrimental to social justice and class mobility, whereas the latter is a competition of individuals and is also not confined to China. To quote a mom who is a teacher, “I can’t compete with others in terms of money, power, status or social network, but I can spend more time tutoring my child.” In a sense, the competition of moms appears to be fairer. However, it inevitably causes educational anxiety among moms.

It is also worth noting that in the end, competition of moms is closely related to competition of dads because all the time and energy depends heavily on financial support. No matter if it is purchasing housing in the best school districts or enrolling children in extracurricular activities, the price is never cheap in most cases. Under this circumstance, low-income families who have no cultural or economic capital will be at a disadvantage in the race.

In the context of a competition discourse that emphasizes educational effectiveness through educational democracy—i.e. individual freedom of choice, parental choice of schools, parental involvement in education, and home and school connecting—educational parentocracy has made competition in the field of education a matter of investment from families as a whole.

In this vein, the success of individual education will depend on the preference and intervention capacity of “investors.” This trend will benefit the middle class, which owns more cultural and social capital, but not the underclass. Therefore, some scholars argue that parentocracy makes education a battlefield of the wealth and will of the parents rather than the abilities of the children, which is contrary to the idea of a “meritocracy” that stresses equal opportunity as well as educational fairness.

The popularity of parentocracy in the second half of the 20th century in Western countries can be attributed to its consistence with conservatism and the will of the free market, thus becoming the scapegoat for social injustice. In the name of “freedom of choice” and “parental power,” it blames individuals and families for education inequality as well as educational and social stratification.

At the same time, it is associated with the rise of the middle class. Reproduction throughout the entire society has changed, so social class inheritance no longer relies exclusively on original wealth transfer, and the middle class can ensure the social advantages of reproduction by diploma, prompting capable parents to buy their kids a competitive advantage. Thus, education is no longer fair and just.

Under the influence of the market economy, parentocracy also exists in China. Despite attempts in the educational sector to follow non-market principles to promote fair, just and balanced compulsory education, there is a huge “stealth market” where market principles have become the dominant logic, and actual competition occurs. As a result, public education is eroded, and fairness in education is strongly affected.

Yang Di is from the Ginling College at Nanjing Normal University.