Using interview data collected from mothers and tutors, this research demonstrates that academic improvement and parental involvement combine to justify outsourcing mothers' educational work, which requires mothers to supervise their children and leads to role strain. Therefore, middle-class families hire tutors providing after-school educational help to maintain a coherent image of intensive mothering. This outsourcing could ease parent–child conflict, maintain the mother's caregiver role (following engendered emotional norms and patriarchal order), and provide another adult role model for the child. Lower-middle-class mothers value tutors' cultural capacity to educate their children both academically and behaviourally. Upper-middle-class mothers outsource teaching aspects, which could risk their carer role, and use educational professionalism to justify the hire. By focusing on Taiwanese mothers' tutor-hiring phenomenon in relation to outsourcing mothering for schooling, this article contributes to sociological perspectives on shadow education and demonstrates how tutoring complements mothering and schooling in Taiwan.