Yang Wang
Over the past decades, China has witnessed a growing exodus of ‘study mothers’ (peidu mama) – migrant mothers who accompany their school-age children abroad in pursuit of education, while navigating the intertwined roles of migrant parent, transnational family coordinator, and de facto single mother. Drawing on ethnographic research with 40 Chinese study mothers in Singapore, this article examines their complex parenting experiences across spatial–temporal and socio-cultural divides. Theoretically informed by transcendent parenting (Lim 2019) and positionality (Alcoff 2006), it argues that their migrant – transnational parenting unfolds as a deliberate, digitally mediated boundary-crossing process that integrates people, resources, and ideologies from both home and host contexts. Central to this process is the tactical crafting of a ‘transnational parenting repertoire’ – a dynamic assemblage of values and practices drawn from both contexts, mobilised in adaptive, context-sensitive ways to redeploy cross-border resources, recalibrate parenting orientations, and renegotiate roles with distant spouses. Shaped by their situated experiences as study mothers – marked by precarious socio-legal status, transnational living arrangements, and cross-border family dynamics – their parenting is inflected by a distinctive parental positionality in which constraint and possibility remain intimately entangled.