Navigating ‘Cruel Optimism’: Ambivalent Aspirations and Parents' Care Labor in Education among Singaporean Families

In Singapore, children’s education is typically presented as “an overriding and all-consuming concern,” fueled by extreme competition for grades and school admissions (Waters 2015: 290). However, parents' desire for academic excellence as a route to better lives is not as straightforward as it may seem. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Singaporean families, this paper explores parents' gendered and affective labor around emerging tensions between aspirations for academic achievement and school-life balance. It examines how parents navigate these conflicting desires and their implications for gendered divisions of roles and responsibilities, drawing on Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” – a state marked by significant anxiety over the unfulfilled promises of modernity and neoliberalism. This is particularly evident in affective attachments to fantasies of “the good life,” such as upward social mobility, job security, or freedom. The conditions of cruel optimism are marked by a prevailing sense of impasse, requiring hypervigilance—a “proactive, hopeful affective force that remains open and indeed seeks out possibilities for change” (Sotirin 2020: 12). In examining how parents renegotiate ambivalent aspirations with regard to their children’s education, this paper highlights the affective landscape underpinning vigilance and the reconfiguration of upward social mobility.