County Companion Mom: When Raising Children Becomes an Adventure

(Transferred from Sanlian Life Weekly, no one else may reprint it without authorization)

For the accompanying mother, the accompanying reading is like a kind of adventure, and the outcome of this adventure may not be optimistic.

Dictation|Yi Zhuo

Reporter | Yin Baitong

Editor|Wang Shan

More with mothers

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the China Rural Governance Research Center at Wuhan University, and at the end of 2018, I began to pay attention to the phenomenon of accompanying my mother. At that time, I was in my second year of doctoral studies and went to do social research in a factory in a township in Chongyi County, Jiangxi Province. It was a OEM factory that processed small parts such as disposable headphones, and the workers inside were basically women in their thirties and forties. The purpose of our research at that time was to explore the current gender division of labor and household planning patterns (production accumulation and consumption patterns of a family) in rural households from the perspective of family division of labor.

In this survey, we found an interesting phenomenon, that is, the vast majority of women in these jobs come from the countryside to the city to accompany them, they rent a house in the county or town, they will come to work after cooking for their children in the morning, go back to cook at noon, come back to work, and then go home to make dinner - the original intention of accompanying students requires them to be flexible in time and take care of their children's study and life, not to make more money. Therefore, their wages are not too high, the factory is to pay piecework wages, the monthly salary of workers is calculated according to the workload, a female worker's monthly income is basically about 1500 yuan, more will not exceed 2000 yuan.

"Mountains and Seas" stills

This phenomenon surprised me. It's a big difference from when I was in school. I am a native of Badong, Hubei Province, born in 1993, and I have been studying in my hometown before going to university. In 1999, there were two public primary schools in our county, and I was one of them, and all my elementary school classmates were from the county seat. My junior high school is a key junior high school in the county, and at most two or three students in a class are rural students. In 2008, after high school, the number of students from the countryside began to increase, and the class was about 1/4~1/3, and most of them were taken from various townships. In short, there were very few accompaniments at that time, and some rural students may be relatives of the teacher at home, and they will borrow from the teacher's house, and the other party can also provide some tutoring. More country children went to boarding schools.

Our later research in Hubei found that the proportion of accompanying students has reached 40%-60%. Our curiosity stems from the academic thinking that education, as a variable factor, has changed the division of labor in peasant families so profoundly.

We previously had a basic judgment on the structure of rural family development in China. Generally speaking, after the rise of the part-time economy, the division of labor of peasant families is generally based on the needs of development to maximize the value of economic accumulation. The typical division of labor model is "half-work and half-cultivation based on intergenerational division of labor", which simply means that the young and middle-aged labor force in the family works outside the home to obtain wage income, and the elderly work in home farming to achieve self-support, reducing the burden of the offspring's pension. Most Chinese peasant families have been in this "half-ploughing, half-work" mode since around the beginning of this century. From the objective perspective of the study, we believe that this is the optimal family division of labor model for rural families, on the one hand, it can maximize the economic income of ordinary peasant families, on the other hand, it can also maintain this benign interaction between urban and rural areas.

A still from "Little Shede"

We were surprised by the process of my mother's reverse return to her hometown. Because, for rural families, part-time work is a rigid income, and once the family lacks a labor force, the economic impact on the entire family is still great. From 2018 to the present, our team has traveled to more than 10 counties and towns, including Hubei, Hunan, Henan, Dongguan and other provinces and regions, to investigate the phenomenon of accompanying mothers, hoping to understand the situation of accompanying students in different regions. The results vary greatly depending on the region. First of all, the least obvious situation of accompanying students is in the eastern region, such as Dongguan, the local economy is relatively developed, the population outflow is very small, and there are many migrant workers, so the characteristics shown here are that some children originally followed their parents to study in local private schools, but as the cost of education increases, both children and mothers will begin to return to their parents' original hometowns. The western accompaniment is not particularly obvious, it is the Yunguichuan area, and parents in rural areas do not pay so much attention to education.

The most prominent situation of accompanying students is in the central region, such as Hubei, Henan, Anhui, these areas can reach about 60~70% because of the proportion of accompanying students into the city. In fact, many of the children we have come into contact with in these local research tend to study in the eastern region where their parents work, such as Shenzhen and Dongguan. When they were in junior high school, they were sent back to their hometown because of the high cost of education.

"Shorty" stills

Regarding the increase in accompanying reading, I can also give another example, in 2020, I once went to a county-level city below Hubei. We interviewed the education department of a school. They told us that because more and more children are moving to the city, they have to add 2,000 new places every year. As there are more degrees, so do the number of schools. What if there is no teacher? Then you have to be drawn from a rural school. From 2017 to the present, they have transferred 150 village teachers from rural schools. Although the policy given by the county is to "draw one to make up for one", the backbone teachers who are withdrawn are all backbone teachers, with decades of teaching experience, and the teachers who have just graduated are given to college normal students, so it has a great impact on the teaching quality of township schools. The county-level city has a township middle school, and since 2001, their high school entrance examination promotion rate has been the first in the county, and after starting to transfer teachers in 2017, it has now dropped to fourth. The principal of the school told me that they used to be the "high-quality student base" in the county, but now they have become a "high-quality teacher base".

There is also a reason behind this example, that is, in order to pursue GDP, some local governments are committed to building education highlight projects and rapidly promoting the construction of "new education cities". One consequence of this approach is that high-quality educational resources will be concentrated in urban areas, which to some extent increases the educational anxiety of peasant families, and they have participated in the educational competition to buy houses in the city and send their children to study, which not only consumes most of the family savings, but also produces a large number of accompanying reading behaviors, which has also become an important reason for the prominence of the phenomenon of accompanying reading.

From stage accompaniment to full accompaniment

In the central region, our survey found that most of the mothers who accompanied the school were "post-80s", and some were "post-90s" who gave birth earlier. They are between 30 and 40 years old, mostly with junior high school education, and at the age of 15 or 6 they go out to work in the economically developed eastern regions. In the beginning, they walked out of their isolated hometown through part-time work and saw the outside world. But life on the assembly line is heavy, boring and depressing. Some people do not go to the assembly line, so they can only go to the construction site and do heavy physical work. In the course of these ten or twenty years, they have endured a lot of hardships and gradually realized the importance of education and academic qualifications.

Their expectations of their children are already very different from those of their parents. I interviewed a mother who told me that in 2000, when her parents raised her to 16 and graduated from junior high school, her parents felt that her life task was almost complete, and she should go out to work and get married in two years. For the rural areas at that time, the income from part-time work was indeed much more than that of farming. But for the current group of young parents, their requirements for their children are relatively high, they hope that their children can at least graduate from high school, and preferably enter college. They have clearly or vaguely realized that education is an important way to change the standard of living and the social status of families, and attach great importance to the education of their children.

Photo courtesy of interviewee

In our research, we found that most of the accompanying readings before 2017 were short-lived and staged. How to understand this sentence? For example, for example, some mothers will come to accompany their children in the year of their children's further education, and rarely start to accompany them in elementary school, basically in the third year of junior high school and the third year of high school. The common saying of mothers is that their children are under psychological pressure during the school stage, and they come to accompany them in the hope of relieving their children's stress and supervising their studies. They feel that for children, this is a key step in life, and if they do not go well, it may affect their future life.

For example, I interviewed a junior high school student, he studied in the county town in the second grade of primary school, and his mother accompanied him, but returned to the township primary school in the fourth grade, and went to the city again after junior high school. When I asked him why, he said that his parents felt financial pressure and high costs, so they chose to go back first and come back in junior high school. In another example, a child in a private junior high school I researched said that his parents told him that if he could be admitted to a local key high school, his mother would come back to accompany him to high school, and if he was only admitted to a regular high school, his mother would come back to see him twice a year. In other words, parents have a basic consideration, that is, whether the child is reading material and whether he can be admitted to the key points. If so, they consider having the child's mother come back to accompany them, otherwise it is another option – they have to balance, after all, for a rural family, a labor force is an income.

But after 2019, the situation of accompanying the whole process has become more and more obvious. That is, the child's mother does not only appear in the critical year of further education, but will accompany the child to study throughout junior high school, high school, and even from elementary school. We are also exploring the causes of this phenomenon. One of them is the change in the social environment. When I was a child, my child's world was still relatively simple, there was no smart phone, and children's entertainment was basically based on cultural and sports activities, at that time, the main problem of left-behind children was that they were separated from their parents for too long, neglected care, and lack of comfort. But the children of these "post-80s" and "post-90s" parents grew up with mobile phones, and they are addicted to the world of the Internet. When we researched, we found that many children are not resistant to online games, and some even use this as a channel to integrate into the surrounding classmates, because if you do not participate, it means that you do not fit in.

A group of children playing mobile games in Changsha, Hunan Province (Photo by Li Feng, Photo courtesy of Visual China)

During the survey, many teachers reported to us that children playing with mobile phones are very serious, and some even play until one or two points. The child's grandparents can't manage this on the one hand, and on the other hand, they don't know what exactly is on the phone. I once looked for a class and looked at their report cards, and I found that the parents of students with good grades were basically teachers or civil servants in townships or public institutions, while ordinary parents worked outside the home, and the children brought out by grandparents had relatively poor grades. At this time, it becomes very important for the mother to come back to accompany the reading.

Another prominent reason is the change in the Ministry of Education's policy on "general job separation". In March 2021, the General Office of the Ministry of Education issued the Notice on Doing a Good Job in the Enrollment of Secondary Vocational Schools in 2021. The Notice requires that in 2021, the "ratio of middle and general employment" should be balanced, and the middle school entrance examination should be "1:1 general job diversion" to achieve a ratio of 5:5 between general high school and middle vocational personnel, which was about 6:4 before the adjustment. This does mean that the future trend of the high school entrance examination is that only about 50% of junior high school graduates can successfully enter the general high school. This policy also made these parents who went out to work in their early years very anxious, in their opinion, going to vocational school is no different from them going out to work, and there is no future. This policy change has also made rural families pay attention to their children's academic problems more and more early. One of the mothers even told me that if her child didn't get into high school, she would go straight to work, and she thought that things in vocational school could be learned in three months in the factory.

Mom in the cracks

When we were researching, it was easy to find accompanying mothers, in order to supplement family income, many of them needed to work locally, we went to garment factories, electronics factories, directly introduced our identity, and then conducted interviews. Another way is to go directly to the family: families who accompany students in the county, they generally live in a more concentrated place, renting around the school. We see that some people are like reading mothers, they will go over and ask, some people are willing to talk and express well, of course, some people are not willing to talk.

Listening to these accompanying mothers, I can feel a lot of pressure on them. The first is the stress of having children. Many children grew up with grandparents, for them, the arrival of their mother is no different from facing a stranger, and now this person is suddenly coming back to live with you, and the children are very uncomfortable. One mother said she often had conflicts with her children, especially when it came to homework. In fact, for mothers who accompany students, it is not easy to bring up children, and their own parents do not have any systematic education methods for them, generally disobedient beating, scolding, and scolding. For their children, although they rarely fight, but there are still a lot of reprimands, then it is easy to have fierce conflicts.

A still from "The Reading Child"

I met a mom who came back in 2017 to accompany her. She has two children, the eldest daughter is in junior high school and the younger son is still in elementary school. The eldest daughter was brought out by her grandparents, and this mother found that her daughter had many bad habits and often skipped school. She blamed herself very much, thinking that the reason why her daughter was like this was because her parents were not around, her habits were not cultivated well, she felt that the child's character had been formed, and what she could do was to keep an eye on the child and not let her go on a crooked path. She said that she learned a lesson in educating her daughter, so she must bring her son well to save one. This is actually the general mentality of many accompanying parents - the eldest has missed it, and the second must be brought well. There is a mother, in order not to let her youngest son play with the mobile phone, she will not take out the mobile phone when watching her son do homework, she will always watch the child finish the homework.

The second pressure of accompanying a mother comes from life itself. Originally, she and her husband worked outside the home and had two incomes, but now that she has returned, her husband has to do more heavy and dangerous labor for the needs of the family. In order to subsidize the family, the accompanying mother will go to the county to find various jobs. There is a mother who is almost 40 years old, her eldest son is about 12 years old, the youngest son is seven or eight years old, she accompanies her in the county, when the children go to school, she goes to the restaurant to work as a waiter or go to the supermarket to register cashiers, and when her son is about to leave school, she quickly goes home to cook. Others go to work at a processing plant in the county. They are actually very busy, so they don't have time to communicate patiently with their children, which is actually a source of conflict. A mother who accompanied me told me that she said that although you see that I have returned, I still have to work 10 hours a day, and my life of working has not changed, I still have to go to work every day, and my children are disobedient.

A still from "The Taste of Rice Blossoms"

Many mothers who accompany them are very anxious, according to their original assumption, as long as they return, the children will be able to obey, and their academic performance will immediately become better, but the reality is not like this. Dealing with children's problems and the pressures of life are mixed up, and they will feel worthless. In the interview, a mother who accompanied me asked me, she said do you think it is better for me to call her once a week, and I am next to her? She said that although I am now accompanying the reader, I have no way to give her this kind of guidance in learning, and there will be contradictions. But as soon as she finished the sentence, she began to say that it might be better to be by herself than to make a video call every week. They are very contradictory. Many people feel that they cannot see the future of their children, and that children are unlikely to get into good universities and good jobs, but if they are not there, children may go crooked. For them, reading with them seems like an adventure, and the outcome of this adventure may not be promising.

(Intern journalist Liang Bingjian also contributed to this article)