Short-Term ‘Intensive Mothering’ on a Budget: Working Mothers of Korean Children Studying Abroad in Southeast Asia

Mothering Ideologies and Early Study Abroad

In her seminal work on class differences in child rearing ideologies, Lareau (2003, 2015) found that American middle-class families make lengthy and concerted efforts to develop their children’s cultural capital over the course of their childhood. In the United States, Hays (1996) coined the term intensive mothering to refer to the dominant parenting paradigm that casts a good mother as one who constantly cares for, attends to, and devotes her time and energy to meeting her child’s needs, and places the child’s well-being ahead of her own needs and desires as her children’s primary caregiver. Hays asserted that “the methods of appropriate child rearing are construed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (p. 8). Although the intensive mothering ideology was initially conceptualized as a White middle-class ideal, studies have revealed that regardless of their racial/ethnic, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds, mothers―including Black single mothers (Elliott, Powell, & Brenton, 2015), Vietnamese middle-class mothers (Le-Phuong, Harman, & Cappellini, 2017), and Korean stay-at-home and working mothers (Chae, 2015)―feel pressured to conform to this ideology of child-centered, time-intensive parenting.

In contemporary Korea, affluent stay-at-home Korean mothers’ devotion to their children’s education appears to reflect a local version of this intensive mothering ideology (Hays, 1996). As with mothers from various Asian cultures, Korean mothers are held to the Confucian mothering ideology, in which a woman’s virtue is expressed through her devotion and sacrifice to her family, especially through the cultivation of her child’s intellectual and moral development (Herr, 2016). Park (2007) has argued that contemporary Korean mothering ideals are centered on the acquisition of children’s cultural capital via elite education. These ideals are enacted by mothers’ extensive management of their children’s early schooling and extracurricular activities, including diligently collecting information and making thoughtful decisions about when and where to engage in ESA (Kim, 2011; Shim & Park, 2008).

At first glance, East Asian practices of voluntary family separation (i.e., a child or an adolescent going abroad alone or accompanied by their mother) in pursuit of cosmopolitan cultural capital for an extended period may seem like an extreme parenting and family strategy. Yet, Huang and Yeoh (2005) have argued that contemporary East Asian mothers’ willingness to move abroad with their children for the sake of education is entirely consistent with the Confucian mothering ideology that canonizes a mother’s willingness to uproot herself and her child to ensure the child’s wellbeing and development. The Chinese saying (孟母三遷, which literally translates as “Mencius’ mother moved three times”) refers to the mother of a Chinese sage, Mencius, moving her residence three times―with the last move next to a school―to provide her son with an environment conducive to development. Indeed, East Asian ESA has drawn both scholarly and popular attention, partly because of the way the nuclear family form is disrupted, reorganized, and negotiated, and partly because the social position of its participants may be considered an elite equivalent of transnational migrant workers who similarly make parental sacrifices to support their family members in home countries (e.g., Dreby, 2006; Parreñas, 2005; Sun, 2013). In this way, the study of ESA families allows for a rich sociological analysis of how class reproduction unfolds through the pursuit of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) within the contemporary East Asian context of what Lan (2014) called compressed modernity and glocal entanglement–where modernization occurred in an extraordinarily condensed time and space, and where global-local (glocal) entanglements emerged between societies with uneven power relations.

Class Diversification of Korean Early Study Abroad

With the rising popularity of ESA during the last decade, Southeast Asian locales such as Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia–where the medium of instruction in public or international schools is English–have become increasingly common ESA destinations (Kim, 2010) due to the substantially lower cost of living and geographic proximity to Korea. For example, more than 24,000 primary or secondary students left South Korea in 2012, and among them, over 5,000 chose to study in Southeast Asia (Korean Ministry of Education, 2013). Kim (2010) found a marked difference in the length of time spent in ESA between less-affluent Korean ESA families in Singapore and their more affluent counterparts. Kim (2015) argued that ESA in more conventional Western English-speaking destinations is mostly a long-term endeavor that may be combined with permanent immigration (Ong, 1999; Waters, 2005). In contrast, particularly for those with limited resources, ESA in Southeast Asia represents a short-term strategy that focuses on spending one or two years abroad to acquire a primary or early secondary education, and then returning to Korea. To date, however, little attention has been given to this emerging cohort of less-affluent dual working Korean parents who have mobilized their limited resources to allow their children to engage in ESA.

This study aimed to address this gap in the literature, by analyzing the narratives of working mothers from less-affluent middle-class families whose children were engaged in ESA in Southeast Asia, and by applying the lens of Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of cultural capital reproduction and Hays’ (1996) ideology of intensive mothering to cases of educational migration and transnational families (Waters, 2012). We note that the question of who is in the middle class is a controversial issue in Korea, especially so in recent years. Various surveys have documented wide-ranging discrepancies between household incomes that the government considers middle class, and a subjective sense of belonging to the middle class (Hyundai Research Institute, 2013). For example, the OECD and the Korean government define the middle-income group as those with 50% (approximately US$37,000) and 150% of the median income (approximately US$54,000), which made up 60% of all Korean households in 2011, and this group is often described in the media as the middle class (e.g., Weekly Donga, 2015). However, a recent survey of 1,128 Korean adults from this median income group found that the overwhelming majority of those who responded (79.1%) felt that they were below the middle class, with 19.8% responding that they considered themselves middle class, and 1.2% reporting that they were above the middle class (NH Investment & Securities, 2015).

Families from this median income group are precisely the ones whose ESA experiences we were interested in understanding for the current study. Conventionally, annual household incomes exceeding US$100,000 that placed families into affluent or upper-middle-class status were considered necessary to send a child for early study abroad to favored English-speaking destinations such as the United States and the U.K. (Lee, 2016). Although scholars have argued that Korean ESA is a middle-class family strategy for acquiring the desired cultural capital in the form of global English, Korean middle-class ESA families in Western locales still tend to have considerable economic capital. For example, Shin (2014) found that Korean ESA families lived in upscale neighborhoods in northern Toronto for the purpose of distinguishing themselves from downtown Koreatown, which was associated with older and poorer immigrants.

Furthermore, given that previous literature has pointed to the meaning and significance of Koran mothers’ roles, and in particular their emotional investments in their children’s ESA success, we focus on working mothers’ narratives (Abelmann & Kang, 2014; Kang, 2012). Scholars have argued that American middle-class mothers who worked full time countered the intensive mothering ideology by constructing varying narratives of good mothering that center around their psychological and emotional accessibility (Johnston & Swanson, 2006), or on being in charge of and responsible for their children’s well-being (Christopher, 2012), rather than on the actual amount of time they spend with their children, and the effort they invested in them. However, little prior work has examined how Korean working mothers navigate the dual pressures of intensive mothering and Confucian mothering ideologies, particularly when faced with opportunities for their children to engage in early study abroad. As such, working mothers’ narratives have the potential to reveal how parenting discourses at the intersection of global aspirations (Abelmann et al., 2014) and the local Confucian mothering ideology reflect what Lan (2014) termed glocal entanglements.

Through our analyses, we will argue that the recent rise in popularity of Southeast Asian ESA destinations, and the under-acknowledged increase of less-affluent, non-elite ESA parents, are not coincidental; in fact, these are at least partly based on strategic choices made by less-affluent families, in their efforts to secure elite status in Korea, and live up to the hegemonic ideal of Korean middle-class motherhood (Park, 2007). We argue that inasmuch as they strive to attain mobility for their children through ESA in Southeast Asia, their attainment of global English capital proves to be elusive, due to families’ limited economic and cultural capital. We further argue that middle-class working mothers struggle persistently against the narrow standard of ideal motherhood set forth by intensive mothering and Confucian mothering ideologies.

Participants

The data for this study are drawn from a larger project in which we conducted in-depth interviews in Korea with 14 mothers, 4 fathers, and their 18 children, from September 2010 to March 2011, after the children had returned to Korea from ESA. We used the purposive snowballing method to identify Korean ESA returnees from various Southeast Asian destinations. Since there is no publicly available registry of ESA returnees, we sought them out through personal connections and recommendations, which included approximately 10 middle and high school teachers in the Seoul metropolitan area–where about a quarter of South Koreans live, and from where a significant number of ESA departures originate, and to where travelers return–as well as other informants who were previously interviewed in Singapore (see Kim, 2010, 2015). Although we relied on the snowball method to identify and recruit potential participants, we also aimed to reflect as diverse a range of voices and experiences as possible in the data, by applying maximum variation sampling (Eder & Fingerson, 2002).

The current study analyzed interviews with eight focal mothers who worked outside of the home, supplemented by interviews with six mothers who did not work outside the home. All mothers were from less-affluent middle-class families. Table 1 summarizes the 14 mothers’ backgrounds, and Table 2 summarizes their children’s ESA arrangements.

Table 1.

Characteristics of Mother Interviewees

Table 2.

Characteristics of ESA children

Of the eight focal interviewees, five of the mothers had accompanied their children overseas, while the other three sent their children overseas to board with relatives, friends, or Korean-run boarding homes (where the boarding-home owner also served as a guardian for their children). The socioeconomic class of the families in this study can generally be characterized as middle class when considering standard indicators such as the parents’ educations, occupations, and household incomes. Most of the parents were college-educated, and most of them were working in white-collar jobs as mid- or lower-level company employees, as afterschool teachers, or they were self-employed. Notably, their social positions in Korea were significantly lower than those of many Korean families who choose the United States as their ESA destination and were featured in previous studies that sampled heavily from the elite professionals (e.g., CEOs and high-level managers at large multinational corporations, lawyers, medical doctors, and professors) with stay-at-home mothers (e.g., Cho, 2004; Lee & Koo, 2006; Lee, 2010).

The families in our study tended to live in middle-class neighborhoods (e.g., the Mokdong and Gangbuk areas in Seoul) and smaller cities near Seoul (e.g., Yongin, Incheon, Paju, Namyangiu), rather than in affluent neighborhoods in Seoul (e.g., Gangnam¹). Moreover, none of the families in this study sent their children to expensive, highly reputable international schools in Singapore. Only two families sent their children to public schools in Singapore that were known for their academic merit, while the remaining families sent their children to public schools, or to non-accredited jun (pseudo) international schools in the Philippines or Malaysia that have substandard facilities and curricula. These class indicators suggest that the families in this study who engaged in ESA in Southeast Asia were significantly less affluent than the typical elite families who engage in ESA in Western sites such as the United States, Canada, and the U.K. (Waters, 2012).

Data Collection and Analysis

The current study employed qualitative methods because they are well suited to exploring the experiences of understudied populations and the meanings inherent in the family life domain (Creswell, 2007). The first author conducted all the interviews in Korean at the interviewees’ preferred locations; most interviews were conducted in a quiet café close to the informants’ residences, while some were conducted at participants’ homes or workplaces. After obtaining the participants’ written consent, interviews were conducted separately with each individual. Attention was given to ensuring the informant’s privacy, and confidentiality was assured even between family members. For example, when being interviewed in a café, mothers and their children were seated at different tables, and far enough apart that they could not overhear our conversation.

The formal interviews―all of which were digitally recorded―typically lasted between 1 and 2 hours for parents (mean = 78 minutes), and between 40 to 60 minutes for children (mean = 59 minutes), excluding time spent before and after the formal interviews. These semi-structured interviews were conducted using a set of open-ended questions regarding informants’ experiences, before, during, and after their children’s study abroad, and the couples’ work experiences. The interview protocol included questions such as the following: “Would you tell me about your work experiences and those of your spouse?” “Would you tell me what motivated you to send your children to study abroad, and why?” “Would you tell me about your experiences while your children were studying abroad?” “What did you (and your spouse) do for your children before, during, and after your child’s ESA?” “What are the things that you as a parent should do for your child?” Participant responses were probed to ensure that their experiences could be understood in their full context.

We transcribed and verified all the data used for the analysis. For the initial analysis, we employed a constant comparison method to identify the core themes (Birks & Mills, 2011; Charmaz, 2006; Creswell, 2007). Initial analysis revealed new insights into the meaning of ESA in relation to the children’s migrations and their mothers’ experience, particularly with respect to the unique challenges and concerns that faced working mothers who had to balance their dual identities as mothers and wage earners.

Enacting Mothering Ideologies as Working Mothers

A key theme that emerged from the narratives of working mothers participating in this study suggested that their perceived shortcomings in fulfilling the role of a devoted manager mother (Park, 2007) had considerable influence on their families’ ESA decision. For many of the mothers in our study who had not been able to uphold this hegemonic Korean motherhood ideal, finding the time they wanted to spend with their children before ESA had been possible only by managing shifts with their husbands and with the help of extended family members (e.g., the children’s grandmothers). They were keenly aware that the small amount of time they spent with their children was generally regarded as evidence of their lack of devotion to their children. Less-affluent Korean working mothers (regardless of the sector or status of their work) often believe that they are not able to play their role as an ideal mother, particularly in terms of managing their children’s education. Past research has amply documented the dilemmas of working mothers who must negotiate their identities as mothers and workers in cultural contexts that privilege intensive mothering (Johnston & Swanson, 2006). However, this study is among the first to examine how intensive mothering and Confucian mothering ideologies are negotiated within the transnational migration context, among families who can ill afford the time and the expenses involved in an early study abroad. Below, we argue that these mothering desires were enacted across both types of ESA migration: among mothers who accompanied their ESA children, and among mothers who did not accompany their children abroad.

Mothers who accompanied their ESA children. Due to strong Korean cultural norms that expect ideal mothers to be intimately and extensively involved in their children’s lives and educational pursuits (Cho, 2004; Kim, 2011; Park & Abelmann, 2004), some mothers we interviewed had chosen to stop working for a limited period of time, and made temporal and transnational household arrangements, even with their limited financial resources. With a lengthy period of preparation for university entrance on the near horizon, working mothers with children in upper primary school or early secondary school grades were particularly concerned that during these critical periods their children were in greatest need of their mother’s support, although―like typical Korean mothers―all of them were also sending their children to hakwons (private educational institutes) (Park, 2012). However, these working mothers faced additional burdens that led to less than optimal ESA experiences for their children, as they often had to limit the duration of their children’s ESA.

The case of Mrs. Han illustrates why self-employed mothers in non-white collar jobs faced more difficulties making ESA decisions than their more affluent counterparts. Mrs. Han had to strike a balance between her role as a self-employed worker and her role as a mother. She and her husband had been running a beer pub in one of Seoul’s newly developed suburbs. Although they earned the equivalent of approximately US$9,000 monthly, which made them the highest-income household in the study sample, the family had a working-class background in which both parents were high school graduates. Although Mrs. Han and her husband were intensely interested in their children’s education, evenings―when their children normally studied―were their busiest times at the pub. Their grandmother cared for the children, but could do little to help them with schoolwork. For Mrs. Han, a year abroad with her children was an opportunity for her not only to focus on her children’s education, but also to recover from accumulated stress and exhaustion related to her work. After discussing ESA with her neighbors, the couple decided that she would take their two children to the Philippines. Mrs. Han explained this decision as follows:

I lived a hard life […] I did everything to get by […]. Once I noticed that my children were at the bottom of my priorities […] I felt very bad because I left my children unattended because of my work […] I was not in a position to devote time to my children, but I had to care for both my business and children […] (Then) my husband suggested that I take our children to study abroad […] [By doing so] I could also take a rest, and our children could study properly.

Similar accounts of being a busy working parent and not able to spend time with her children were also voiced by Mrs. K. Lee, who ran a restaurant with her husband before her children undertook ESA.

White-collar working mothers provided reasons similar to those given by self-employed mothers in the service sector (like Mrs. Han). For example, Mrs. Park, who worked as a kindergarten teacher, told us that “the most important thing for a mother is to carefully monitor the children every day,” though she did not even have time to sit down with them for breakfast, and instead fed them in the car while driving. However, white-collar mothers were generally in a better position to make more informed decisions, because their social networks were often wider, giving them access to more information. That is, they had heard a great deal about ESA, including various pros and cons, as well as about the perceived necessity of English language mastery from their colleagues who had also seriously considered and actually followed through with ESA. Occasionally, their own international work experience helped them to prepare for ESA. The case of Mrs. Song illustrates this point. Her business trips to Southeast Asia had indirectly influenced her choice of the ESA destination for their children:

I have worked for nearly 19 years […] while working, I have not managed my daughter well […] My choice of Malaysia was influenced by my frequent business trips to Singapore, which I like personally […] It was hard to enter a school in Singapore because of tests and other requirements […]. I found out that Malaysia was somewhere between Singapore and the Philippines [in terms of the quality of education].

Middle-class working mothers with freelance jobs were in the best position to take a temporary leave from their work to accompany their children abroad. Mrs. Seo and Mrs. Kee, who used to work as English teachers at a private educational institute (hakwon), and who often worked until 8 or 9 p.m., could leave their jobs for about a year to accompany their children to undertake ESA because they could easily obtain similar jobs upon their return to Korea.

At the same time, these white-collar working mothers had experiences similar to their self-employed counterparts in that their work schedules in Korea had prevented them from being able to directly manage their children’s after-school learning activities, and childcare was often provided by their mothers (or mothers-in-law) who lived nearby. Mrs. Seo observed the following:

As a working mother, the one year that I spent with children was solely for the children and was meaningful for me […]. While there, I realized that there is a difference between a mother who is with their children physically 24 hours a day and a mother who is not […] [During ESA,] I invested my time solely and fully for my children. When I did, I came to learn little details about my children and learned that I had not been a real mother before [emphasis added].

As illustrated by the above cases, when working mothers with more modest economic backgrounds organized their children’s ESA and rearranged their own lives to accompany them overseas, they often considered the time that they spent with their children during their ESA as an intensive mothering period in which they had fully invested their resources and time on behalf of their children. Their perceptions that they had not engaged in the appropriate and expected behavior of a mother prior to the ESA served as their specific motivation for temporarily leaving their work to accompany their children abroad.

For these working mothers, ESA presented a chance to get to know their own children better and to reconsider their experiences of motherhood. Mrs. Seo above described this sentiment by saying, “I had not been a real mother before.” She went on to explain that her being a full-time mother abroad required some adjustments for both her and her children:

While helping children study and being with them all day long, I had many troubles with them at first. It took about five or six months for me and my children to get accustomed to one another [of being together all day long]. When they could study hard abroad was after this five- or six-month period. That was the difficult part for me.

Mothers who did not accompany their ESA children. Similar mothering desires also emerged among the three working mothers who had not accompanied their children on their ESA. For the two mothers with white-collar jobs, taking a long-term leave would have jeopardized the likelihood that they would be able to return to their work after the leave, so they decided to send their children abroad without accompanying them. This was the case for Mrs. Jang (government-owned public company employee) and Mrs. Song (who worked in a small trading company). Mrs. Jang expressed her angst and her sense of having failed her children as follows:

I feel bad, as I think that the best thing to do when a child is young is to be with them. But as a [working] mother I was not, and still am not, with them. And [my child’s] academic performance is not good. I am getting so much stress […]. Sometimes my hands shake when I am feeling anxious and concerned about his studies.

Similarly, Mrs. Song described her feelings as follows:

In raising my child, I often think that I failed […]. I think that I did not do mothering properly […] even though I work, I should have checked how my child did homework. That was a must, which I did not do.

She then went on to reveal her motivation for sending her daughter on ESA:

I realized that English proficiency is the most important thing in Korea. If [my daughter] could speak English fluently, I thought that there wouldn’t be any problem for her future, so I sent her to English-language kindergarten […]. [But as a working mother] I couldn’t manage her study well.

Given this sense of having failed her daughter in her English language education, when her daughter expressed an interest as a ninth grader in going abroad, Mrs. Song fully supported her daughter’s initiative and searched for a safe boarding school for her to attend in Malaysia.

The other mother who chose not to accompany her child was self-employed, and worked in a small family business that relied on family labor. Mrs. S. Lee and her husband ran a shop selling dried fish at Seoul’s most famous fish market, where they worked from 4 a.m. until late at night every day throughout the year. As a self-employed shop owner who worked long hours, she was keenly aware of the limited amount of time she spent with her children. She described her life as follows:

We go at dawn to work and come home late at night. […] This makes it difficult to manage our children’s study […]. Because we are not rich, we couldn’t consider the U.S. or the U.K., so we chose Southeast Asia.

Nevertheless, she too had cosmopolitan desires for her family that she sought to realize by taking advantage of the opportunity to send her child to the Philippines for ESA along with his cousins. As to the reason she sent him abroad for ESA, she stated, “I expected him to study English without difficulty. That’s what I hoped when we sent him.”

For her and other working mothers who did not accompany their children overseas, the desire to compensate for their inability to support their children’s education on a daily, hands-on manner had led them to the next best alternative to being a good mother, by being able to provide an educational opportunity for their children that the mothers believed would help their children acquire the desired social capital associated with English language proficiency and a cosmopolitan experience.

Enacting Mothering Ideologies on a Budget

Previous studies have suggested that Korean families who choose ESA in Southeast Asia tend to be less affluent than Korean families who choose ESA in Western nations (Kang, 2012; Kim, 2010). This appeared to be the case for the majority of the families in this study. Many of the mothers in our study cited the affordability of ESA in Southeast Asia compared to ESA in the Western nations (e.g., the United States, Canada, New Zealand) as a motivating factor. Nevertheless, we found different motivations―even among these less-affluent middle-class families―for selecting Southeast Asian destinations for their children’s ESA, just as families make use of varying forms of private supplementary educational services in Korea according to their own needs and resources (Park, 2012; Park & Abelmann, 2004). Korean ESA families followed divergent strategies even within the same destination according to their family’s resources and cultural capital, which did not always correspond to their objective class indicators such as household incomes. We grouped these narratives according to whether the families appeared to envision a long-term budget and plan for their children’s English education (long horizon) or whether they viewed the ESA as a short-term, one-time only investment (short horizon).

Families with a long horizon. Although all the families in this study were less-affluent middle-class families, compared to the elite professional Korean families who typically send their children for ESA, there were some mothers (namely, Mrs. Kee, Mrs. Song, and Mrs. Seo) who appeared to have selected Southeast Asian ESA as part of a longer-term plan.² For these mothers, the choice of Southeast Asia for ESA was not primarily motivated by its affordability, but by its proximity. Southeast Asian ESA offered a practical solution to their aspirations to provide their children with an English-language immersion experience in a locale that was relatively proximal to Korea, and to allow frequent family reunification visits. Mothers from these families spoke of the ESA as a natural choice that constituted a stepping-stone in a sequence of carefully orchestrated English-language educational options and mobility pathways that are available to middle-class and affluent South Korean families. English-language kindergartens in wealthy Seoul neighborhoods as well as private primary schools and specialized high schools³ (e.g., foreign-language and science high schools) are favored by affluent Korean families and by those yearning to provide their children with a similar educational background (Park & Abelmann, 2004). In particular, many middle-class Korean families aspire to have their children attend foreign-language high schools in Korea, which generally have better track records in placing students in top Korean universities. In this regard, the middle-class mothers in our study with a longer horizon emulated their more elite and affluent counterparts by viewing ESA in Southeast Asia as one practical step of a long-term strategy to cultivate their children’s English language and cosmopolitan education. These families tended to send their children to Southeast Asia for ESA at an earlier age and held realistic expectations, based on information gathered from their social networks, about what can be achieved through short-term ESA. Mrs. Kee’s accounts illustrate this point.

Mrs. Kee was a teacher at an English-language kindergarten in Seoul’s Mok-dong, a middle-class district known for having good schools and hakwons, and her accounts generally reflect the attitudes of Korea’s middle class. Many of her relatives had already sent their children on ESA or had studied abroad for their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. In this milieu, Mrs. Kee had considered many different strategies for her children’s education, including finding good English-language teachers in Korea. Her decision to engage in ESA was shaped by her observation that cultivating English-language ability in an exclusively Korean setting (even at an English-language kindergarten) would not be possible. She summarized her thinking as follows:

Our ESA year was as natural as a one- or two-month trip abroad. […] ESA was not a hurdle or trampoline but a natural sequence or flow. Studying English was something that we had done all along. It was not a big deal but a natural one. […] We invested a lot in learning English, but developing English-language ability in Korea was not possible. I tried to teach, but it was not possible in Korea. […] Our ESA was intended to solve this problem [emphasis added].

Upon their return from ESA, working mothers in the educational sector such as Mrs. Seo and Mrs. Kee were able to find a better hakwon for their children. Although working mothers were again busy with their work upon their return to Korea, they aimed to play a bigger role in their children’s studies after ESA. For example, Mrs. Kee reported that although she could not monitor her daughter’s studies on a daily basis, during the exam periods, she fashioned herself as her daughter’s tutor and helped her with practice exam questions, “checking the answers, making her redo what she got wrong” by sitting next to her until dawn. Mrs. Seo also reported similar efforts with her children after their return from ESA, monitoring many assignments of her children’s hakwon sometimes until after midnight. These working mothers with a long horizon had access to social networks (e.g., through their profession or through their work places) and cultural knowledge that allowed them to have more realistic expectations about the level of English mastery that could be achieved in a short ESA timeframe. They had considered the pros of a study abroad and the possible drawback of their children falling behind in the Korean curriculum, and they had selected Southeast Asia as a strategic choice and part of a longer-term plan.

Families with a short horizon. Whereas those mothers with a long horizon viewed ESA in Southeast Asia as one of multiple steps in their children’s education, and demonstrated a greater involvement in their children’s education after ESA, mothers with a short horizon viewed their Southeast Asia ESA as the primary (and perhaps only) opportunity their children would have to acquire English-language skills. These mothers who viewed Southeast Asia ESA as a short-term investment (in time and money) tended to have very high expectations for their children’s English language mastery during their ESA, partly since they lacked complete information about undertaking ESA. For these mothers, the relatively low cost of ESA in Southeast Asia–including the geographic proximity to South Korea to reduce the cost of travel–allowed them to send their children on ESA, which they otherwise would not have been able to afford. These families appeared to be stretching their limited resources to create an ESA opportunity that attempted to mirror the strategies chosen by more affluent Korean families. In return for their short-term investment, the mothers had expected that their children would have a transformative experience that would translate into the self-confidence and worldliness required of a global citizen (Kang, 2012).

For example, Mrs. Han, who runs a pub with her husband (both of whom were high school graduates) conveyed her appreciation of the significance of the English language as social capital and discussed wanting to give her children what she could not have afforded growing up in a poor family.⁴ When asked what had motivated her to undertake ESA, she stated, “I wanted to give my children an opportunity to learn English properly so that they could live their lives with pride.” And indeed, Mrs. Han’s elder son secured an entrance to a foreign-language high school upon his return from ESA―a much desired short-term outcome for ESA. However, Mrs. Han continued to feel that she could not measure up to the more affluent stay-at-home mothers, as the ultimate goal in Korea is not entering an elite high school, but rather an elite university:

Mothers should have a lot of information. In fact, we shouldn’t make light of Gangnam mothers as soccer moms. I feel that I lack a lot of information when it comes to raising my children. (Q: When do you feel it?) For example, to send a child to a U.S. college, the mother should know if he needs SAT or AP scores so that she can help the child. I learned about this only recently. […] I would do whatever I can for my children, but I feel that I am not able to help that much. I learned that I cannot do many things because I do not know about many things.

Mrs. Han’s emphasis on her lack of information reveals an important gap between affluent stay-at-home Gangnam mothers and less-affluent working mothers like her. She was able to help her son along the Korean mobility pathway by securing his admission to an elite high school. Mrs. Song’s following account reveals the sentiment that working mothers’ investments of money and time in a short-term ESA still did not measure up to the educational management prowess of stay-at-home mothers who spend a significant amount of time gathering information that is not readily available:

I have a friend. She makes many sacrifices [for the sake of her children]. She also has so much information about education. […] In contrast, I know nothing. As I work in the office, I do not know anyone [from whom I can get specific information that is really useful for children] […] My friend sends her children to a good hakwon even though it is far away [from her home]. I send my children to a hakwon in my neighborhood as it is close and convenient. Because I do not have detailed information about what to do and where to go, I feel my children are behind. I think the reason my children are behind is largely because of me. (Q: What about asking your colleagues?) Working people do not know much.

Mrs. Jang echoed a similar sentiment when she said, “I feel bad, as I think that the best thing to do with a child is to be with them but as a [working] mother I cannot do that.” She continued by making the following observation:

If I were a stay-at-home mother, I might manage him from what time to do this or that and talk with him closely and motivate him. But in reality, in the morning, I go to the office earlier than him or leave home about the same time. At night, we come back late at night.

As suggested by these working mothers’ narratives, the short-term Southeast Asia ESA signified―for their children’s education and the mothers’ own dedicated mothering commitments―an opportunity to accrue some social and cultural capital that had thus far eluded their families. However, whereas working mothers with more social capital had approached ESA with practical and achievable aims and had more financial resources while abroad and a long horizon, working mothers with less social capital lacked prior cultural knowledge of ESA in Southeast Asia and had insufficient financial resources, leaving them to sometimes feel that their families had not been able to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by ESA or that they had set their expectation of ESA too high.

The two types of ESA mothers’ narratives appeared to reflect “the long shadow that social class origins cast on life outcomes” documented by Lareau (2015, p. 2) among middle-class versus working class and poor families in the United States, whereby which the less well-to-do families lacked the cultural knowledge of how institutions work. Although the less-affluent middle-class working mothers in this study strategized to compensate for their previous lack of intensive engagement with their children’s education, the costs of ESA and its consequences upon their return to Korea proved quite high relative to the marginal gains achieved by most of their ESA children in their academic standing. Our analysis revealed that cultural capital― in the form of English language mastery and a clearer pathway to upward social mobility―remained quite elusive for those mothers who had begun with less social capital.