(CFP)

Dai Ping, whose son is a first grader in a primary school in Beijing, has noticed a growing number of higher educated stay-at-home mothers around her community. Currently, 11 children in her son's 44-student class have stay-at-home mothers. Dai, a biology major, once worked at a research institute in the United States in the prime of her career before choosing to raise her son at home.

Haidian District, where Dai's son goes to school, has a high density of higher learning institutions, research institutes and hi-tech companies. Like Dai, most of the parents at her son's school have received a higher education from renowned universities.

Lu Jing quit her job as an editor at a publishing group four years ago and returned to family life. Lu found that the number of students with stay-at-home mothers in her daughter's class had spiked from only one four years ago to six now. After dropping their children off at school, the six mothers, some with postgraduate degrees, sometimes went to the gym or the shopping mall together.

While the rise of stay-at-home mothers is swift in China's most first-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, as well as Guangzhou and Shenzhen in southern Guangdong Province, usually, the trend is less noticeable elsewhere.

Lin Yang, a stay-at-home mother in southwestern Chongqing, said that her son's kindergarten class has more than 20 children, but only two mothers, including Lin, tend to their needs full time. Lin, who dropped out of the labor force several years ago, attributed career women's reluctance to return to family life in Chongqing to the fact that more parents of young children are locals, with grandparents who can help with child rearing. Lin said that another reason is that people's commuting trips are less time-consuming and jobs are usually less stressful than those in first-tier cities.

Motives

Stay-at-home mothers are a relatively new social group in China, first appearing in coastal cities during the 1990s where the economy registered the fastest growth nationwide. A survey on women's social status conducted in Guangdong in 2000 indicated that about one quarter of career women were willing to quit their jobs and focus on family life if it was financially viable.

While the opportunity to watch their children grow up is a good enough reward for some women to leave work, some stay-at-home mothers feel forced to leave the workforce after failing to handle the stress of an exhausting job and motherhood.

Jiang Dan, a student of Changchun University of Technology in northeastern Jilin Province, wrote her master's thesis on the study of full-time housewives in 2010. In her paper, she included a survey of 238 educated women and studied their attitudes toward the housewife lifestyle. A total of 192 respondents said that they would be willing to quit work. Among these respondents, mostly between the ages of 35 and 45, 150 said that they were struggling under the double pressure from career and family.

Lu, the former editor, told China Newsweek magazine that her most vivid memory about her breastfeeding days was holding her daughter in one hand and typing words into her laptop with another to meet a deadline. The first words her daughter learned to say were "Ms. Busy"—a nickname her husband often called her. Lu said that she eventually decided to quit her job after finding that exhaustion, insomnia, anxiety about her career prospects and guilt over ignoring her family were eating her up inside.

Among stay-at-home mothers, Lu is not alone in making her choice due to work pressure. According to a women's lifestyle survey conducted by the Women of China magazine in 2011 on career women in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Ningbo in eastern Zhejiang Province and Taiyuan in northern Shanxi Province, their average daily working hours exceeded eight hours, with 85.3 percent of respondents reporting stress from work as a result of a lower-than-expected salary, peer competition and long working hours.

Part of this trend may be a reaction to the experience of these young parents' own childhood, when they were latchkey children of parents who both worked. They want their own children to have a better childhood and home life than they did.