According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the education level of Chinese women has been rising rapidly in the past decade, and the proportion of girls with higher education has exceeded half. At the same time, the proportion of full-time mothers is steadily increasing, with 2.2 and 2.5 times as many post-90s and post-95s choosing to be full-time mothers as post-70s, respectively.
It is no coincidence that Americans across the ocean have also found that since the mid-1990s, the higher the education of women, the more time they spend on childcare instead. More than two-thirds of the girls who graduated from ordinary universities are working mothers, but only one-third of the girls from Ivy League schools remain in the workplace to work every day after they have babies.
Is it a waste for highly educated women to be full-time mothers? Why do women who have received good education since childhood and struggled to become elite in the workplace finally choose to return to their families? What problems did they encounter? And what are their tips? Is it better not to choose this path if you don’t have money?
One Article surveyed more than 50 highly educated full-time mothers and talked to 10 of them in depth. They are from Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Kunming and Hong Kong, and have been certified public accountants, media editors-in-chief, designers, senior consultants and corporate executives.
But they are also full of hope: “The education and resume I once had will not be wasted, and full-time motherhood is a more complete life experience, but once I have the opportunity, I will definitely return to the workplace.”
Zheng Ting, 38, experienced an exaggerated “persuaded to go home with children campaign” five years ago, which is still fresh in her mind.
She graduated from East China Normal University with a bachelor’s degree in English, then studied in the United States and got a double master’s degree in MBA and MSIS from Boston University. Before resigning, she had been doing foreign affairs-related work, up to corporate vice president, in charge of six departments.
From 2013 to 2015, Zheng Ting gave birth to two children, and continued to work afterwards, causing strong dissatisfaction from her family. Her mother commanded her mother-in-law to sit downstairs with the baby every day, waiting for her to take time to “breastfeed”, and this almost demonstration made her finally compromise and resign to go home.
In “Kim Ji-young ’82”, when Ji-young was pushed to have a baby, she worried that becoming a mother would change a lot, but the father seemed to be unaffected.
Unlike other mothers, the first thing Jessica hears after giving birth is not the loud and clear cry of her baby, but an overwhelming number of sick notices from doctors – “The baby is born, but it’s in bad shape”, ” Even if it is cured, there is a 90% chance of cerebral palsy” and “You must do early intervention!”
“It became clear to me then that one of us had to return to the family. We made a decision very quickly: Mom came home.”
At the time, Jessica was a multimillion-dollar-a-year corporate executive, rotating globally and changing cities almost every three or six months. Her husband worked for a well-known fast-moving company, and the two of them were the director of supply chain and the director of branding. Before she had her baby, Jessica never thought she would be out of work, “I got pregnant in Germany and the baby was born in New York. If my daughter hadn’t been born prematurely at 28 weeks, my next goal would have been to go to India.”
Years after the fact, Jessica asked her husband why he let me come home in the first place. The gentleman’s answer was, “Because you’re a better cross-border learner.”
Jessica gave an internal bitter laugh, while feeling that it was some kind of convention, “Almost everyone defaults that mothers are better suited to go home with children, and it has nothing to do with academic knowledge or earning power.”
In the Japanese drama “I, to the end of the day”, the female lead, Yuki Higashiyama, says from the perspective of working women: women are easily punished by motherhood after having children.
Going home to be a full-time mother after having a baby is not the first option for many Chinese women. The Working Mothers Survival Report 2017 shows that only one out of five working women plan to go home full time after having a baby.
Our questionnaire also shows that none of the women with college education or above actively choose to be a full-time mother. They are between 30 and 44 years old and have been taught since childhood that women should be self-reliant. Being a full-time housewife who depends on her husband’s income is basically the opposite of the values they believed in when they were growing up.
However, after having a baby, mothers find themselves with little choice. There is always a sacrifice to be made between family and career, self and husband, and many times, mothers almost instinctively choose to sacrifice themselves rather than their husbands.
In the movie “Marriage Story”, the female lead Nicole feels like a director’s wife and a mother to her son, but not herself.
Nan Li, a Shanghai mother born in 1980, currently has a son and a daughter. She was once a very “ambitious” person in the workplace, working as a doctor for two years after graduating from college, and then pursuing a second degree from East China University of Science and Technology, specializing in intellectual property, and switching to a law-related career. Her upward career path came to an abrupt end when her second child was 3 years old.
It was 2018, and her grandmother, who had been helping to watch the baby, was sick back home, and the oldest was in the first grade of a private elementary school with heavy schoolwork. Li Nan and her husband a discussion, decided to resign themselves home. “About the resignation itself is a bit of a pity, but for the resignation candidate, there is no entanglement.”
Roya, a 43-year-old Hong Kong mom, went through a similar selection process. Before resigning, she was in a headhunting company as a senior consultant, annual salary of more than a million, Mr. dry is investment banking, the two are quite smooth career. What broke the plan was the birth of her daughter 8 years ago.
While working and raising a child, Roya has been in a state of “motherhood anxiety” for a long time, “leaving the house every day is a very painful thing”, the child is always “crying from the heart “She blamed herself for “not being able to meet the needs of the children”. When the child was almost a year old, she made up her mind to quit her job. “When I told my husband that I decided to quit, he just said, let me have more time to think about it.”
Throughout the process of having and raising a baby, Roya’s husband was considerate and supportive of her, but she also never considered asking him to come home with the baby, “Actually, he’s not necessarily worse at watching the baby than I am because he has a better temper than I do, but he loves his job so much that I wouldn’t ask him to give it up.”
The 2020 Auntie Yearbook shows that the cost of hiring an auntie is 5,752 yuan per month on average down in various cities across the country, as opposed to the average monthly salary of 2,642 yuan for employed people nationwide.
In first-tier cities like North, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the cost of hiring a live-in aunt typically starts at 5,000 yuan per month and can go as high as 15,000 yuan, but in 2019 the city’s average monthly wage for employed people in Beijing was 8,847 yuan and in Shanghai it was 9,580 yuan. So for many mothers, one of the big reasons for being advised to go home with children is that you don’t earn as much as you spend on hiring an aunt, so you might as well go home full-time and save money instead.
But for many highly educated mothers, before going home to be a full-time housewife, their own income is not more than the old tolerance. This is the case of Kunming mother Wang Yue, who graduated from Southwest Forestry University with a master’s degree and married her husband with a monthly income of 10,000 yuan, which is higher than her husband.
But after the birth of a child all changed, because of the lack of help, she had to go home as a full-time mother, day by day anxiety, “raising a child is not easier than work, but he has been working with promotions and raises, I am a little anxious to move in place.”
The Japanese drama “Shame but useful to escape”, converts the year-round labor of a full-time housewife at home in Japan into an annual income of up to about 179,000 RMB.
Zheng Ting was already earning 500,000 a year when she married her husband, who earned only $4,000 a month. After she had two children, the situation was reversed and her husband’s salary became three times hers. “He is from the north, a bit macho, and always thinks that a woman’s focus should still be on the home. He said the wives in their circle are not working, he thinks women should not work.”
In the end, the income gap became the basis for her husband’s descending blow to Zheng Ting. “He then asked me how much money you earn to and fro. My Maotai stock rose one point is 50,000, did you earn one point in a month of work?”
In our questionnaire, half of the highly educated full-time mothers are in the status quo of “relying on their spouses to support them” and accept it, but the anxiety of not having their own income still lurks.
In the movie “Finding You,” the actress Li Jie speaks to her male client’s wife, who has been a full-time housewife since she got married, after winning a custody battle for her male client.
Cecilia had a baby in 2016, but she insisted on working until November 2019 when she went home full time. Before quitting her job, she was a senior finance director earning nearly a million dollars, “I always felt most comfortable spending my own money.” Although she convinced herself that staying home with a baby was “a little break from work after more than a decade,” she was still very anxious about the lack of income, and this anxiety even caused her body to react and develop baldness.
Before she gave birth, Jessica had a joint bank card with her husband, “basically I spent the money he earned directly in it”, she didn’t feel anything at that time, she bought whatever she wanted. But after coming home as a full-time mom, her feelings have changed subtly, “You always feel as if you’re using your husband’s money, and when the family is missing an income, you feel a little bit guilty when you spend it.”
She has met many full-time mothers who come to complain to her, “I feel that after paying so much and buying a dress for myself, my husband says, “Why are you spending money again? This may be an unintentional comment, but it’s actually very hurtful.” Jessica is glad she insisted on saving a “f*** you money” when she went to work, which invariably increased her confidence in being a full-time mom.
The 2021 China Mom Survival Report shows that the vast majority of moms don’t spend their money on themselves. The biggest expenses of the family are mortgage repayment and enrolling children in training courses, followed by medical expenses and travel expenses. Two-thirds of Chinese moms spend less than 10,000 yuan a year for themselves.
Zheng Ting’s 8-year-old daughter attends a private elementary school with tuition of 80,000 a year, and her son attends a private kindergarten with 30,000 a year, plus 20,000 for her sister’s English lessons, 10,000 for her brother’s singing lessons, and some investment in going to shows and exhibitions. “The bulk of our money is either (spent) on travel or the kids’ education. Luxuries and stuff don’t make any sense to me.”
Because she no longer works to earn money, she jokingly compares her husband to an “ATM”. Her husband gives her 20 percent of his income every year to cover all these expenses, and the remaining 80 percent stays in his own hands, “He is in finance, to save up eggs to produce chickens.
Roya worked for many years before she had her daughter and has basically achieved wealth freedom, “We don’t have any concerns about our family finances. She chose an international school for her daughter, with the most relaxed class load but the most expensive, with a tuition fee of HK$170,000 a year. She also enrolled in two art interest classes, piano and dance, at HK$300 per hour. In order to give her daughter an enlightened view, before the epidemic, she had accompanied her baby all over the world, visiting a large number of museums and art galleries.
“She (daughter) has been to more than 20 places in Europe alone. For example, when the school organized them to study the history of ancient Rome, we would go to Rome and walk through all the ancient Roman ruins. And it was an in-depth tour, staying in Rome alone for seven or eight days.”
Roya laments that being a full-time mom is actually very demanding on the family’s finances, “Behind all the resources the kids have now, it’s all about the family finances.”
Parenting and management are the same
Jessica remembers that when her child was half a year old, she had a serious talk with her husband, “Full-time motherhood is also a job, don’t feel as if staying at home and doing housework and bringing up children is easy, to maintain the orderly progress of the whole family, this one thing itself it has a great value.”
This kind of talk, after that she insisted on doing every six months. “On the one hand, so that he can see my contribution to the family a, on the other hand is also their own and themselves in dialogue, the mother can not first look down on themselves.”
She feels deeply that even if she did well in the workplace back then, she always seems to become inferior after a period of full-time work at home. “So you must always keep an equal dialogue with your teammates, don’t feel like waiting for your value to be discovered, it’s actually the same as the workplace, you must let your boss or people at the same level see what you have done, don’t default to the other side all know, otherwise you will have a lot of complaints.”
Many highly educated mothers have had quite successful careers in the workplace before returning home, holding various director and executive positions. When they return home, they continue to think like a “family CEO” and take care of all the family affairs, as Jessica says, “parenting and management are the same”.
Zheng Ting’s daughter is studying at Pinghe Elementary School, and when she moved up to elementary school, her daughter’s reading level in English slightly exceeded that of American children of the same age, and she finished her first grade OU in math and reached independent reading in language, “all because I helped her get it. Asked what training institutions she had enrolled in, she laughed, “None of them are as good as Mom herself.”
She graciously invited us to her house. “You will die laughing, our house is just like a training center, all the teaching aids, all kinds of board games, Lego, we have it all at home, I can open a training center by myself.”
In the workplace, Zheng Ting worked in a manufacturing company, specializing in business negotiations between the Chinese side and the U.S. side, “such as price, technical details,” a lot of things are communicated under the table first, and then sign the contract on the table. Sometimes a talk from the first day at 9:00 a.m. to the next morning at 7:00 a.m., to talk about the deadlock when she has to go to mediation, re-enable the cooperation, “basically I am responsible for the project landing that person”.
After working full-time with children, she became the owner of more than 10 WeChat groups, including learning, art and medicine, where she shared information and answered parents’ questions. When she found out that a certain picture book was selling particularly well, or who was particularly good in the field of parenting education, she contacted them to give lectures, and she invited them more often, and the lectures were all dry, so parents were very grateful and respected her as “Teacher Zheng”.
She takes her children to the children’s theater to see performances, and after seeing them, she gets to know the sales of the theater, and when there are good performances, she makes group purchases in the parents’ group, “Now I know basically everyone who does children’s theater in Shanghai. When the children were discussing the fire department in kindergarten, she organized five families to sign up and took the children on a field trip to the fire department.
“I’m now a mom, a wife, a tutor for my kids, and a calm observer and enthusiastic participant in education,” Zheng Ting says.
In her eighth year of hands-on parenting, Roya increasingly feels that for the reproduction and evolution of the entire human race, a highly educated woman educating her own children is the best way to go.
“I did all her stuff together by searching for information online. Those educational institutions, we also went to audition, and when we finished, we thought it was better to teach ourselves at home.”
Her daughter has never had any outside tuition; when she learned piano she hired a tutor and had the teacher come to her home. The content of knowledge, she prefers to adopt a “light-hearted approach”, “often when playing outside, I teach her some content. This is not the same as going to outside training institutions to fill in the learning.”
When her daughter’s classmates come over to play, she’s heard little kids complain, “They say mommy spends a lot of money on me, but I’m sitting there not interested at all, it’s almost like being in jail.”
Cecilia also didn’t send her son to training institutions or early childhood classes. Many of her friends’ children around her got into OU classes, “but I don’t really want to give him OU.”
She scored 146 out of 150 in the college entrance exam, but in junior high school, she only scored 10 out of 100 in math. Her experience of learning mathematics is “need to be enlightened”, “that is a way of thinking”, suddenly one day will all understand, before that is slowly accumulate, no need to rush.
The main things she focuses on are her children’s habits, self-discipline, and concentration. She chose to come home when her son was 3 years old because “3-6 years old is the period of character formation of children, other people come to take care of the children, more spoiled, but I am more principle.”
Cecilia herself likes to read books very much, and when she travels a lot, she always has a book in her suitcase. Anywhere she goes, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, she will go to bookstores and buy books. After bringing up her children herself, she managed to develop her son’s habit of reading books.
“When I read books at home, he will follow, and it is probably much more important for parents to accompany their children to do something so that he can learn by ear than to spend money on classes.”
In 2016, the National Health Planning Commission conducted a survey in 10 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenyang, and more than three-quarters of full-time mothers said they would like to go back to work if they had help with their children. Our questionnaire also showed that 90% of full-time mothers with college education or above wanted to return to work.
We asked these mothers about their parents’ attitudes toward being a full-time mom, and many of them mentioned the word “disappointment.
“They felt a bit sad because they had put a lot of effort into raising me and knew that I had worked hard since I was a child, and the key was that I had a good job situation before I had children, and I was satisfied with my position and salary.” Roya said.
Before becoming a full-time mother, Rice was the deputy editor-in-chief of a well-known domestic publishing house, planning many best-selling books, and quit her job in order to accompany her husband and children to develop abroad. Her parents always wanted her to return home, “They always thought women should have their own jobs and income.”
Rice’s husband would occasionally show envy at her lack of work pressure, “I would immediately remind – I would prefer to take on the pressure of work as opposed to being a full-time mother.”
In the TV series “The First Half of My Life,” full-time wife Luo Zijun gets caught up in the minutiae of raising a child and gradually loses herself, eventually suffering marital difficulties.
Jessica also remembers that her first three years as a full-time mother were “very hard”, with no more than six hours of sleep a day, and most importantly, she was stuck in the endless chores and saw no hope.
“When we say that full-time mothers have freedom of choice, I think it is unfair. Because any working woman has the freedom to choose to become a full-time mother, but how many full-time mothers have the freedom to return to the workplace at any time? The freedom in this is actually not equal.”
Jessica’s way of solving this anxiety for herself is to set a goal for herself: to definitely return to the workplace once she has the opportunity, and to “stay in a position where I can return to the workplace at any time.”
“The truth is that all moms are full-time, but we can’t just be full-time moms. When the child is 3 or 4 years old, you will find that his need for you slowly becomes less, and at this time if you then look up and find that you do not know what you are going to do, this state is actually quite dangerous.”
For this reason, she began to read, exercise, study, write, think again when her daughter was about 1 year old, restore herself, change formal clothes that can go out every day, not just wear pajamas all day long, paint herself a light makeup, and consciously try to develop her social circle.
“We sometimes need to work twice as hard, or even 10 times harder, than working moms to truly gain freedom of choice. If being a full-time mom is walking through a dark tunnel, then returning to the workplace is the lighthouse in the distance that keeps me going. When my daughter starts kindergarten, I will have more time and I will become a useful person to society.” Jessica said.
Zheng Ting is now in a part-time position, and she runs an English tutoring class in her neighborhood, teaching English to children three times a week. Before that, she gave classes to children at the neighborhood council, and there was no charge for the public service. “Because I always think you have to have a craft that can eat, you have to keep exercising, and you can’t lose this craft.”
Having read an MBA, she is used to looking at the present with the thinking of a five-year plan and a ten-year plan, “Every thing you do now is to pave the way for the future.” In the future, she wants to switch to education, “For example, my children may not need me after they reach junior high school, then I can concentrate on expanding a class like mine into a school, from a small school to a big one.”
She also mentioned that nowadays many full-time mothers looking for part-time jobs are always looking in the direction of insurance, micro-business, etc. “Some people go to read a certificate like nutritionist by themselves, which I think is also good, but the most important thing is that this thing you do now, five years later, ten years later, you can develop it into something? People must have a small career of their own, to have a place where they can get a sense of accomplishment.”
Roya found that she became less anxious after becoming a full-time mom instead. “I used to stay in consulting, and I was exposed to very similar projects and people, working in corporate management, hoping that I would be PROMOTED every year, promoted every year, or jumped to another, better company. It was such a path at that time, and I didn’t know any other path existed.”
Because of bringing up children, she met different people, “They took different paths, but they were all pretty successful.” Her interest in art curation has occurred, “and Hong Kong is a big art market,” and she plans to move in that direction in the future.
Jessica also says that bringing up a child has given her a deeper appreciation for “management”. “The workplace is very goal-oriented, but when you manage a child, she doesn’t have to obey you just because you’re a mother.”
In the process of bringing up a child, she had put in a lot of effort, but it turned out to be “useless”, but “the process itself made me understand a person in a more comprehensive way. I often reflect on the process of bringing up my daughter, which is exactly the same as when I used to bring up people in the workplace.”
“After understanding this level, you don’t get anxious. You will believe that indeed all experiences become your wealth, and you may one day return to the workplace and find that this experience of being a full-time mother is a plus. Some of the things I gained from bringing up my children have also helped me in the workplace. Life is indeed like a circle, there are comings and goings, all we can do is to live the moment well.”
United States.
Full-time motherhood is considered a profession in the United States. “Housewife” (homemaker) is one of the official choices given when an individual fills out his or her work status. If a housewife gets divorced, her husband is required to pay her a large amount of alimony and, if the children are with their mother, child support.
Even if the housewife has never worked or paid into social security, she will receive half of her spouse’s pension when she reaches retirement age. This money is paid by the state and does not affect the amount received by the spouse. Even if you get divorced, you can still receive half of your former spouse’s pension as long as you have not remarried.
Japan.
In Japan, a “spousal tax deduction” was introduced in 1989 for companies. When the wife of a company employee earns less than 1.03 million yen (about 60,000 yuan) per year after deducting social security expenses, she is exempt from the husband’s personal tax, and when the wife earns less than 1.41 million yen (about 83,000 yuan) per year, the husband’s personal tax can be reduced accordingly. Under this system, if the wife chooses to be a full-time housewife, the amount of tax levied on the husband is reduced, and the entire family receives a correspondingly larger benefit.
In 2007 and 2008, Japan also implemented the “divorce pension division system” in phases. If a Japanese housewife petitions the court for divorce, she and her husband will share their pensions equally. If the wife requests the division, she will share her pension with her husband, whether he agrees or not. The longer the marriage, the more the wife, who is a full-time housewife, will divide the Housewife’s pension upon divorce.
United Kingdom.
First of all, British housewives enjoy a certain amount of tax exemption and can transfer it to their own husbands, thus saving on household expenses.
Full-time mothers are also exempt from paying National Insurance (somewhat like the combination of social security and medical insurance benefits in China), but enjoy an automatic accumulation year and can qualify for a full National Pension at the legal age of retirement.
At the same time, by taking on the responsibility of raising children in the UK, you are entitled to receive certain benefits, such as Child Benefit, Guardian’s Allowance, Single Parent’s Allowance, Maternity Allowance, etc. Benefit payments from the government are usually transferred directly to the mother’s account.
Germany.
Germany attaches great importance to family education and parental companionship gives full-time mothers certain protection and rights at the social and legal levels, and has various allowances such as parental payments and partner bonuses.
Parents who work shorter hours due to the birth of a child, or who do not have a job, can receive a monthly parental payment of 300 to 1,800 euros. Typically, the parental benefit is 65% of your net income, capped at €1,800. For those who did not have an income before the birth of the child, a minimum amount of 300€ can be received.
And this benefit is not only for the mother, both partners can receive it jointly if their working hours are shortened by taking parental leave. If you have twins or multiple births, the amount of this allowance is also increased.
The partner bonus, which is intended to encourage parents to share parenting and work tasks, is an additional 4 months of additional parental payments for both parents if they are both on parental leave and both work part-time during this period.
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