In contemporary China, children’s education has become a key arena through which middle-class families pursue social mobility, moral respectability, and cultural distinction. Within this context, mothers increasingly assume primary responsibility for managing children’s educational and extracurricular trajectories, particularly in culturally valued domains such as piano education. While existing studies document parental involvement in children’s music learning and its cognitive and cultural benefits, less attention has been paid to how such involvement operates as a gendered moral practice. Feminist scholarship conceptualizes motherhood as a socially constructed role shaped by ideals of “good motherhood,” emphasizing intensive care, emotional devotion, and self-sacrifice—expectations further intensified in East Asian societies marked by Confucian family values and educational competition. Piano education thus offers a revealing site to examine how maternal care becomes moralized and gendered. This study addresses an empirical gap by exploring how Chinese middle-class mothers perform “good motherhood” through musical mothering and how these practices reproduce, negotiate, or subtly challenge patriarchal relations within family life.

2. Research Aims and Questions

This study investigates Chinese mothers’ involvement in their children’s piano education. It seeks to explore how these mothers perform “good motherhood” through their musical mothering and, in turn, how such practices contribute to the reproduction of patriarchal power. Accordingly, the following research questions were formulated:

RQ₁: How do Chinese mothers perform “good motherhood” through their musical mothering practices, and what motivates these performance?

RQ₂: In what ways does musical mothering of Chinese mothers contribute to the reproduction of patriarchal power within family life?

3. Theoretical Framework

The study draws on the concepts of doing gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987) and gender performativity (Butler, 2011). From this perspective, motherhood is understood as a situated and ongoing accomplishment produced through repeated social practices. Musical mothering is conceptualized as a gendered performance through which maternal virtue, responsibility, and moral worth are enacted and evaluated. This framework allows for an analysis of both structural reproduction and maternal agency, capturing how power operates through everyday affective and moral labor rather than overt coercion.

4. Methodology

This research adopts a qualitative methodology grounded in interpretative phenomenology. Data will be collected through participant observation and in-depth interviews with approximately eleven Chinese middle-class mothers who are primarily responsible for their children’s piano education. Participants will be recruited using purposive and snowball sampling, with inclusion criteria focusing on mothers’ educational background, family income, and sustained involvement in children’s piano learning.

Participant observation will take place in piano lesson settings and, where possible, in domestic contexts to capture everyday practices and interactions. Semi-structured interviews will be conducted face-to-face, beginning with open-ended prompts and followed by emergent questions to elicit rich narratives of experience. Data will be analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), following systematic stages of familiarization, coding, theme development, and interpretative synthesis. Ethical approval will be obtained, and informed consent will be secured from all participants.

5. Expected Contributions

This study is expected to contribute to research on motherhood, gender, and education by illuminating how patriarchal power is reproduced through intimate, morally charged parenting practices rather than explicit domination. By foregrounding mothers’ lived experiences of musical mothering, the study offers a nuanced account of how care, love, and sacrifice become mechanisms of gendered governance, while also highlighting moments of negotiation and agency within patriarchal constraints. The findings will be relevant to feminist sociology, music education research, and broader debates on gender, family, and social reproduction in contemporary China.

This study adopts a qualitative research design grounded in interpretative phenomenology, aiming to explore Chinese middle-class mothers’ lived experiences of musical mothering in children’s piano education and the gendered meanings attached to these practices. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) framework (Smith et al., 2022) was employed to capture how participants make sense of their everyday mothering practices and moral self-understandings. Data were collected through participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eleven Chinese middle-class mothers. Purposive sampling combined with snowball sampling was used to recruit participants who were primarily responsible for their children’s piano education, whose children had received piano instruction for more than one year, and who met defined middle-class criteria in terms of education and employment. Participant observation was conducted in both institutional (piano lessons) and domestic settings, facilitated by the researcher’s role as a piano teacher, allowing access to mothers’ everyday practices and interactions. In-depth interviews were conducted face-to-face, beginning with a broad, open-ended prompt and followed by emergent, iterative questioning to elicit rich narrative accounts. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using IPA procedures, including familiarization, inductive and deductive coding, theme development, pattern recognition, and interpretative narrative construction. Field notes from observations were used as supplementary data to enhance contextual understanding and analytic depth. Ethical approval was obtained from the researcher’s institution, and informed consent was secured from all participants.

This study concludes that Chinese middle-class mothers’ involvement in children’s piano education constitutes a deeply gendered and moralized practice through which “good motherhood” is continuously performed and evaluated. Drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis, the findings show that musical mothering operates not merely as educational support but as a key site where gender norms, class aspirations, and patriarchal power are reproduced through everyday maternal labor. The study identifies three interrelated strategies through which mothers perform “good motherhood”: cultivating children’s cultural taste and future-oriented capital, providing intensive and devotional care through time- and labor-intensive supervision, and engaging in emotional regulation that oscillates between positive guidance and disciplinary control. These practices are structured by a dual system of accountability. Externally, mothers are subject to social scrutiny and stigmatization shaped by norms of intensive and “scientific” mothering. Internally, they internalize these norms as moral self-identities, generating persistent feelings of anxiety and guilt that further discipline their parenting practices. Importantly, the findings demonstrate that patriarchal power is reproduced less through overt coercion than through the moralization of maternal care and sacrifice. Mothers often cede major educational decision-making to fathers, rationalize paternal absence through gendered narratives of breadwinning and expertise, and individualize structural inequality by embracing self-sacrificing “supermom” ideals. At the same time, the study reveals moments of negotiation and quiet resistance. By redefining the moral meaning of persistence, loosening control, or discontinuing piano education, some mothers subtly rework dominant expectations of good motherhood and reclaim limited agency within patriarchal constraints. Overall, the study contributes to feminist and sociological understandings of motherhood by revealing how gendered power is sustained through intimate, affective, and morally charged parenting practices, while also highlighting mothers’ reflexive capacities to negotiate these structures in everyday life.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2011). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Cho, E. (2015). What do mothers say? Korean mothers’ perceptions of children’s participation in extra-curricular musical activities. Music Education Research, 17(2), 162–178. Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. Douglas, S. J., & Michaels, M. W. (2004). The mommy myth: The idealization of motherhood and how it has undermined all women. Free Press. Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. Yale University Press. Ilari, B. (2013). Concerted cultivation and music learning: Global issues and local variations. Research Studies in Music Education, 35(2), 179–196. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life (2nd ed.). University of California Press. Savage, S. (2024). Musical mothering: Intergenerational strategies amongst the middle classes. Palgrave Macmillan. Savage, S., & Hall, C. A. (2017). Thinking about and beyond the cultural contradictions of motherhood through musical mothering. In L. Ross, M. J. Rose, & J. Hartmann (Eds.), Music of motherhood: History, healing, and activism (pp. 32–50). Demeter Press. Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2022). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research (2nd ed.). Sage. West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151. Zhang, W. (2020). Shadow education in the service of tiger parenting: Strategies used by middle-class families in China. European Journal of Education, 55(3), 388–404.