Zheng Mu
This study draws on in-depth interviews with 36 college-educated Chinese stay-at-home mothers in Singapore to examine how gender, class, and migration status intersect in shaping parenting decisions and experiences. While much of the literature emphasizes structural and cultural constraints on migrant women, recent scholarship highlights migration as a potential site of agency. Building on this perspective, I argue that Singapore's institutional context offers both limitations and opportunities. Restrictive employment policies and limited kin support hinder women's participation in paid work, reinforcing dependency despite their high educational attainment. At the same time, Singapore's safe, diverse, and education-driven environment enables these mothers to reframe stay-at-home motherhood as a deliberate, future-oriented investment in their children′ development. Particularly, Singapore's tolerance for and diversity of parenting options allow them to reject narrow instrumental models in favour of more nurturing, hands-on, and engaged parenting. Through this reframing, they reconstruct their identities not as dependent wives but as competent, strategic, and productive mothers. This paper contributes to feminist migration studies by complicating dichotomous depictions of migrant women as either passive or empowered. It shows instead how mothering becomes a moral and feminist project through which agency, security, and status are negotiated across international landscapes.