Beyond Conventional Metrics: Alternative Middle-Class Choice among Chinese Homeschooling Families

Abstract

Sociologists have extensively studied the prevalence of intensive parenting among middle-class families as a response to uncertainties about maintaining their privileged class status. Most studies, however, have focused on traditional school systems, which overlooks the full spectrum of middle-class parenting values and practices, particularly those beyond mainstream schooling. To address this gap, this study explores an alternative middle-class choice for raising and educating children through the lens of Chinese homeschooling. Drawing on in-depth interviews with middle-class parents from 30 Chinese families of school-age children being homeschooled in Taipei and Hong Kong, this study investigates the paradoxes and ambiguities that arose as the parents navigated and negotiated competing values for their children. The findings reveal that the parents mobilised their cultural repertoires to seek a coherent narrative that made sense of and justified their homeschooling goals and practices in the Chinese context.