1. Introduction

In international literature, many parents, regardless of their nationality, socio-economic status, and cultural background, are reported to embrace high educational aspirations for their children’s academic performance. Especially in the “credential societies” wherein credentials functioned as a stepstone to middle-class occupation, parents attach great importance to children’s academic achievement.

While existing research consistently documents high educational aspirations per se among parents, far less is known about how such aspirations are communicated, negotiated, and embodied in everyday family life under conditions of structural disadvantage.

This study examines how educational aspirations are transmitted within rural-to-urban migrant working-class families in China, a group that has been widely reported in the literature to hold high educational expectations for their children. Particular attention is paid to the affective mechanisms through which such aspirations are conveyed and negotiated within the family.

Whereas middle-class families typically articulate high educational aspirations to enable their children to become like themselves, working-class families often express high educational aspirations with the explicit intention that their children should not become like them. Compared with middle-class families, the transmission of educational aspirations (TEA hereafter) in working-class families therefore appears to be more complex. Middle-class children grow up within a middle-class habitus, possessing everyday familiarity with middle-class occupations, lifestyles, and educational pathways, which allows them to more readily interpret and negotiate parental expectations. In contrast, for children in working-class migrant families, middle-class life often exists as a vague and abstract imagination rather than a lived and experientially grounded reality.

Specifically, the study wants to explore what kinds of educational aspirations migrant parents transmit to their children. And how are these aspirations communicated, negotiated, and sustained through everyday parent–child interactions?

2. Theorizing educational aspiration transmission

Theoretically, the study builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories to reconceptualize educational aspiration as a classed and embodied practice, rather than a stable cognitive belief or verbalized goal. From this perspective, educational aspirations are not simply transmitted through explicit encouragement or rational planning, but are gradually inculcated through routinized practices, moral narratives, and affective cues embedded in everyday family life.

Existing psychological and educational models of intergenerational value transmission—such as value internalization frameworks—tend to assume that parental expectations are clearly articulated, accurately perceived, and meaningfully negotiated within relatively resource-secure family contexts. This study argues that such assumptions are inadequate for understanding aspiration transmission in structurally disadvantaged families. Among migrant working-class parents, aspirations are often characterized by ambiguity, hesitation, and experiential gaps: parents strongly desire upward mobility for their children but lack first-hand experience of middle-class educational trajectories and occupations.

To capture this dynamic, the study conceptualizes aspiration transmission as a process of de-embodiment and re-embodiment. Parents seek to detach children from identification with manual labor—often through exposing them to the physical hardship, instability, and stigma associated with working-class work—while simultaneously encouraging an orientation toward education as the sole legitimate escape route. Crucially, this process operates less through positive vision-building than through negative affective mobilization, particularly the cultivation of fear of failure and fear of becoming “like us.”

Analytically, the study identifies three recurrent modes of aspiration transmission—verbal saturation, bodily exposure to labor, and staged occupational experiences—which function not as deliberate strategies but as practical schemes shaped by parents’ own classed life histories. These practices generate what the study terms a “negation–fear–discontinuity” mechanism: while effective in distancing children from manual labor, they often fail to provide concrete images of a good life or usable tools for navigating educational obstacles, potentially producing anxiety, self-doubt, and fragile motivation.

This study adopts a qualitative, ethnographic research design to examine how educational aspirations are produced, transmitted, and negotiated within rural-to-urban migrant working-class families in China. The empirical data are drawn from one year of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, enabling close engagement with families’ everyday lives and interactions. The primary data sources include field notes, in-depth interviews with 19 migrant parents and 7 migrant children, and participant observation conducted in 6 migrant families. All interviews were audio-recorded with informed consent and transcribed verbatim. Field notes were written contemporaneously and expanded shortly after observation. Thematic analysis was applied to unpack the processes through which educational aspirations are transmitted with reference to Braun and Clarke’s (2019) work. The analysis began with inductive, bottom-up coding, aiming to identify recurring patterns in parents’ narratives, everyday practices, and parent–child interactions related to education, labor, and future orientation.

This study reveals that educational aspirations in migrant working-class families are transmitted through affective and embodied mechanisms rooted in parents’ lived experiences of precarity. While migrant parents maintain high aspirations, these are primarily framed as a defensive —emphasizing what children must not become rather than offering concrete, attainable futures. The analysis identifies three recurrent modes of transmission: verbal saturation of failure narratives, direct exposure to the damaged laboring body, and staged vocational hardship. Together, these constitute a “negation–fear–discontinuity” mechanism. Through this process, children are socialized to distance themselves from manual labor, yet middle-class life remains a "blurred imagination" lacking practical grounding. This study critically argues that such practices are premised on a thorough negation of parents’ own lives. While they may succeed in mobilizing fear as a motivational force, they simultaneously foster children’s devaluation toward the moral worth of ordinary labor, including qualities such as diligence, endurance, and practicality. Moreover, this mode of aspiration transmission fails to provide children with concrete representations of a good life or with sufficient tools to navigate potential failure. When structural or academic obstacles emerge, children are therefore particularly vulnerable to self-blame, withdrawal, and disengagement. These findings resonate with European and international research on migration, social mobility, and educational inequality. They highlight the need to move beyond deficit explanations of “low” or “misaligned” aspirations and to attend instead to the emotional costs and unintended consequences of aspiration transmission in contexts marked by labor insecurity, credential inflation, and limited upward mobility. The study thus calls for educational policies and support mechanisms that not only raise aspirations but also provide meaningful guidance, institutional mediation, and emotional support for families navigating structurally constrained futures.

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