Mothering with mobile communication technologies in urban China

Abstract

Childhood and motherhood in 21st century China are becoming increasingly embedded in mobile technologies. In major urban areas, smartwatches aimed at children and designed to facilitate location tracking and adult-child mobile communication have become popular in recent years. This study explores how use and understandings of mobile technologies intersect with emergent forms of urban intensive mothering in an environment where children face fierce competition in education. Drawing on qualitative materials collected through ethnographic research methods, I examine the roles of mobile phone technologies􏰀particularly smartwatches and smartphones—in processes of middle-class mothering for children aged 7 to 10 in the city of Guangzhou. My study shows that in the current climate of intensive education in urban China the long study hours of preadolescents are at the core of middle-class parenting practices because parents are seen to play a crucial role in boosting the performance of their children while grandparents are considered as unqualified to educate their grandchildren properly. This requirement of parental involvement leads teachers to exert significant pressure on parents to accompany children during their long hours of study. The study shows how mobile technologies help parents negotiate parenting tasks with school actors, secondary caregivers, and even children, as a response to an increasing social and cultural emphasis on parental companionship and to increasing demands on parents, especially mothers, to accompany the educational progress of their children. I show how mobile technologies are used by mothers to overcome time pressures and thus attend to the perceived needs of children in the context of an intensive education regime that gives children a large number of academic tasks. However, the technologies also generate new tasks for caregivers, especially mothers, who are confronted with intensified online communication with educators and other caregivers and with new tasks such as supervising children’s online activities. I found no evidence of active resistance to these complex dynamics of social and technical transformation. Some mothers have complained about how mobile phone technologies have facilitated a significant increase in their responsibilities as childrearing coordinators, but the overall attitude is pragmatic and accommodating. Confronted with a highly competitive educational environment and an emerging culture of intensive mothering, some women favored becoming full-time housewives and primary-caregivers, but the majority continues to hold on to their careers and mobile phone technologies have enabled them to keep their jobs without neglecting their “labor of love” as mothers and their moral duties as educators. This dissertation makes an important contribution to social studies of the technological dimensions of gendered processes of labor division reconfiguration within the household.