During the summer of 2021, an article titled “Non-Local Mothers Join Hands to Raise Children in Big Cities” went viral on Chinese social media with more than 100,000 readers—and was later reported by China Youth Daily. Intrigued by the case, this article intends to delve into the phenomenon of child-rearing, and how it moves beyond family boundaries in metropolises, to be conducted within communities of strangers. The theoretical question behind our research is: Why is the practice of parenting re-crossing family boundaries against the backdrop of dissolving social foundations for collective child-rearing and growing responsibility for family-oriented parenting? Is it possible to reshape the roles of family, society, state, and the market in childcare?

“W” Street is one of Shanghai’s four suburban centers, which has a unique appeal to families who value early education. Mom “S” pioneered the communal parenting experiment mentioned at the beginning of this article. New mothers, represented by S, constitute a new group emerging in community life. They are willing and capable of connecting child-rearing with greater economic production and public life.

Taking advantage of practical sociology’s “process-event” analysis method, this article attempts to capture these mothers’ continuous efforts to help parenting transcend family boundaries and integrate with regional resources, including the formation of a communal child-rearing support network, communal child friendly spaces, innovative parent-child activities, and a communal child-rearing culture. All data revealed in this article was collected from field investigations which began in 2020.

Support network formed

The first step was to build online communities. Mom S defines herself as a “slash career mom,” meaning she is “raising children on the one hand and pursuing a career on the other.” This was the starting point as S began to explore communal child-rearing in Shanghai. With good writing skills and technical support from her husband, S started her business in 2013, after the birth of her first child. S took courses in psychological counseling, set up a personal public account on WeChat, and ran her own online chat group. The WeChat groups were for psychological counseling and picture book reading, and the target audiences included mothers who were also the primary caregivers. At its height, S ran more than 30 online chat groups altogether. Though online communities are convenient, they lack in-depth communication. Therefore, S began to offer offline activities in order to expand her circles.

S later had an unexpected opportunity to serve as the director of an agricultural garden in her community. In the garden, there was a space converted from an old container, called “Little Blue Room,” separated by a wall from the community where S lives. Originally, SYC social organization, which operates the community garden, held various lectures and family activities that were open to the public in the space. In 2020, upon negotiation, S was temporarily appointed head of the community garden as a volunteer. Through promotional activities for the community garden, S became a grassroots entrepreneur and built her communal child-rearing support network around the concept of “raising children together.”

With the help of the physical space and platform provided by the community garden, the online groups of mothers, managed by S, met offline. As a resident of G community, S planned planting classes, garden design classes, lessons on traditional use of herbs (such as mugwort) during the Dragon Boat Festival, and other special parent-child activities in the garden. With the support of community workers, S was able to incorporate community activities with her parenting groups, which built external support for the formation of a communal child-rearing support network.

Next, a private non-profit organization was established. In October 2020, B association was officially approved, with the purpose of promoting residents’ sense of participation, volunteering, and promoting families’ continuous participation in community autonomy and construction. Its vision was to enrich residents’ lives, uncover community talent, advocate for co-creation in the community, enhance public welfare awareness, and improve residents’ sense of happiness. It became a professional social service organization committed to mutual assistance and wide participation. The establishment of such an organization meant that the “mother groups” won social recognition and become a force in pluralistic community governance of the neighborhood.

In retrospect, S and her mother groups went through a process of seeking external support and establishing connections based on their own and their family’s child-rearing needs. In this process, women who explored collective child-rearing in the community gradually stepped out of private life and engaged in the larger social structure, interwoven with different actors in the government, market, and society. Their subjectivity is also reflected in their unique starting point and their efforts to integrate child-rearing with the space, activities, and cultural practices within communities.

Innovative use of public space

Within walking distance of G community, there are many places for children’s activities, which seem abundant, but are often scattered. Due to the administrative logic of territorial jurisdiction, geographically adjacent spaces are often administratively run by different communities, and cannot be used together. Therefore, in practice, there is not enough room to organize events.

However, an interesting turn took place with the summer camp that mother groups organized. Under the leadership of S and her parenting groups, children had physical training in the gyms and sport centers, used restaurants for painting classes, warmed up at the basketball court in the park, visited small local exhibition halls, planted vegetables in the community garden, and carried out traditional cultural activities such as “wearing Hanfu costumes and learning Sinology” in the public pavilion in their community. In the end, these activities dynamically bonded together various spaces for children in the neighborhood.

The dynamic, practical child-rearing space not only transformed normal urban settings but also brought more attention to people in these activities, truly connecting children and their parents through real social life scenarios. Given this, in 2020, W street was listed as Shanghai’s first child friendly demonstration community, forming a “one center, multiple sites” child activity network. It reflects efforts from administrative levels to build a “big community,” presenting more possibilities for future urban planning.

Diversified parent-child activities

In 2020, there were five effective theme clubs that S and her mother groups ran, hosting 120 formal themed activities and more than 100 informal additional activities amid the pandemic, directly serving 1,965 households, while benefiting over 5,000 households online. Almost all activities are crowdfunded or sponsored, designed, and delivered by talented women from all walks of life in the community. These activities fall into two broad categories: Some are independent, based on individual members’ expertise and observation of real life needs in the community; The second type of activity is in collaboration with local, community, and social organizations, where ideas are generated from the mother groups.

For working parents without the help of grandparents, the disconnection between time for school and work is a real headache. In this light, the mother groups set up evening and summer care, borrowing community activity spaces and recruiting students from within the community. They only charged a small fee and let members serve as teachers, realizing the goal of “raising children in a collective effort and letting them grow up in a mixed-age community environment.” These services are offered under the slogan of “mother knows mother better, mother knows children better,” conveying not only the trustworthiness of mothers’ care, but also mutual help between mothers and the consensus of what kind of child they want to cultivate.

In addition to schoolwork and thematic activities, there is another unique activity in the practice of S and her mother groups. Out of their common goal of “raising children in a down-to-earth way,” they would blend real life family situations and community planning into small tasks for children, as they collaborated and solved puzzles together.

Common concept of child-rearing

With the emergence of the aforementioned organization, space, and content, the concept of communal child-rearing has gradually taken shape, which can be summarized in the following three aspects. First, parents value personal involvement in their children’s development, rather than relying heavily on elders or outsourcing to training centers and institutions. Specifically, these parents have a unique understanding of education and place an emphasis on companionship. In addition, small families who stay in Shanghai do not have enough local relatives and resources to adequately support them.

Second, the irreplaceable value of community environments for children’s growth has been recognized, so participation in community life and making neighborhood friends are refined as a kind of “down-to-earth cultivation,” where you can learn things that cannot be learned in training classes. The reasons behind this consensus may vary.

Third, behind communal child-rearing is the real dilemma of non-local mothers who lack support. Mothers actively cope with this by sharing the responsibilities of childcare and forming a deep sisterhood in the process.

On top of this, young mothers in this organization further expanded child-rearing from families to communities, and gradually re-integrated gender and age division of labor within the community. At the end of 2020, S was elected by the community to participate in Shanghai’s community talent competition. Here, the core ideas and her mother groups reached a larger audience, connecting further with community governance.

Under the current global childcare crisis, communal child-rearing extends from communities, exploring resource integration beyond family boundaries, to balance women’s role as mothers and workers and to allow institutional wiggle room for personal childcare. This attempt not only has positive significance for exploring a more public multi-body cooperative parenting system, but also reflects the unique value of women in community governance.

Shi Yunqing is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.