Narratives of Chinese Rural-to-Urban Migrant Mothers’ Experiences in Mother-Child Interactions and Self-Evaluation: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

While previous research has highlighted the crucial role of parent-child communication in alleviating the developmental problems faced by left-behind children, little research has investigated how migrant parents maintain ties with their children and construct their parental identity while they are physically away. Based on the symbolic interactionist perspective of identity construction, this qualitative research collected the first-hand accounts of 30 Chinese rural-to-urban migrant mothers about their experiences in maintaining ties with their children and examined how such experiences relate to their self-evaluation in motherhood. This study identifies four types of maternal self-evaluation. The first type of mothers had little interactions with their children who were very young, and their maternal self was constructed mainly out of the cultural and social understanding of motherhood. The second type of mothers evaluated their self-identity positively based on the perception of being able to maintain relational connectedness and securing exclusive influences on their children. The third type of mothers narrated accounts of unfavorable parent-child interactions and constructed a resigned and gloomy view of their maternal self. The last type also evaluated their self-identity negatively. Yet, they maintained hopes of redeeming the maternal self through changing parental practices. As their children grew older; however, these mothers seemed to have more negative self-evaluation and struggled harder to maintain close mother-child relationships. The findings echo the idea of symbolic interactionism that experience is interpersonally constructed and constituted by the social structures and ideologies. While the perception of maintaining deep parent-child bonding and having positive influences on children is crucial for the construction of maternal identity, these mothers also use the social expectations of the larger society with regard to motherhood to evaluate themselves. The interplay between the sociocultural context and actual experience which evolves between the mother and the child should thus be understood.