Raising Children or Cultivating Oneself: Maternal Consumption and Self-Projects of Urban Middle-Class Mothers

Maternal consumption is an important way for middle-class families to participate in their children's education. Existing studies mostly focus on two types of maternal consumption: child-rearing-oriented and self-development-oriented. The rise of market-oriented family education guidance services has given birth to transformative maternal consumption that combines the purposes of both child-rearing and self-development, which has become a new research focus. Taking a group of urban middle-class mothers who are deeply involved in transformative maternal consumption as the research objects, this paper examines their expectations and practices for self-growth, as well as their handling of the tension between child-rearing and self-development. The study finds that the transformative maternal consumption of middle-class mothers is an instrumental self-project. On the one hand, they hope to "become better versions of themselves" and emphasize their own development; on the other hand, they hope to use their own development as a lever to promote their children's growth. Through the consumption practices of learning to be "calm", learning to "rely on themselves", and learning to "connect", middle-class mothers have constructed a self-project centered on "caring for themselves" (improving emotional competence), "inward exploration" (achieving independent development), and "serving the public good" (enhancing practical ability). However, although middle-class mothers seem to firmly "become better versions of themselves", they actually linger between the maternal responsibility of "being a mother" and the self-growth of "being themselves". If family education courses focusing on personal growth fail to bring about "child-rearing" effects, middle-class mothers will instead fall into double anxiety between self-growth and child-rearing dilemmas.