Of flexibility, futurality and fracture: a temporal perspective into migrant parenting in China

How China’s gigantic rural migrant population juggle economic productivity and family social reproduction is a well-researched topic, little, however, is written from a critical temporalities perspective. Based on longitudinal qualitative data gathered from two provinces, I unpack the temporal challenges encountered as well as strategies developed by rural migrants to care for and educate their children through a multi-level analysis. I report three findings. First, to cope with temporal constraints imposed by urban governance and production regimes that strategically incorporate migrants as a permanently temporary, disposable and exploitable workforce in cities, rural migrant families adopt generational and gendered division of labour to reconfigure parenting roles across time and spaces, hence ‘flexible’ care arrangements. Second, the pace and the timing of care (re)configurations are often determined by ‘critical moments’ in children’s educational career which is pursued as a future-oriented family project. Last, the conflicting and competing temporalities required of migrants from their precarious labour conditions and from their parental roles to accommodate children’s structured school schedules create fractures in parental care-giving and intergenerational intimacy. The findings reveal coexisting vulnerabilities and resiliencies of China’s migrant working class. I conclude with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological and policy implications of this study.