Event overview
Book Talk: "Digital Parenting Burdens in China: Online Homework, Parent Chats and Punch-in Culture" by Professor Sun Sun Lim (co-authored with Yang Wang)
As a global AI superpower, China has experienced dramatic technological transformation, especially within the home. China’s digitally connected families in urban Chinese cities are avidly deploying a range of digital technologies within and beyond the household. With regard to their children’s academic pursuits, a plethora of apps, online platforms and gadgets have emerged to help parents connect with schools and teachers, keep up with their children’s progress and provide support for their learning and personal development. But with heightened digital connectivity, Chinese parents must reckon with a slew of digital parenting burdens - parental accountability, peer pressure and performative parenting. Digital Parenting Burdens in China delves deeply into these aspects of family life in an intensively digitalising society. Based on 80 interviews with 60 Chinese parents in Beijing and Hangzhou before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book captures how these technologically infused parenting practices have intensified even as parents bear the weight of social aspirations and the quest for academic excellence. It also demonstrates how Chinese parents navigate the rocky terrains of children’s online learning during the pandemic lockdowns, feeling both supported but also overwhelmed by always-on, hyper-connected parenting technologies. Being a technology leader on the world stage, China’s adoption of trend-setting innovations has ramifications that extend far beyond its shores. Digital Parenting Burdens in China taps into the global fascination with China, and with the encroachment of digital technologies into homes. By focusing on the experiences of middle-class Chinese parents amidst the Covid-19 lockdowns, it will contemplate the implications of digitalisation for the future of parenting and family life, and consider how society must respond to these ostensibly ineluctable shifts in post-pandemic times. Empirically grounded and theoretically informed, this book draws on original fieldwork and interdisciplinary insights from communication, media studies, sociology, psychology and STS.
Sun Sun Lim is Professor of Communication and Technology and Vice President for Partnerships and Engagement at the Singapore Management University. Her research focuses on technology domestication by families and young people, AI ethics, and the future of work. She is author of Transcendent Parenting: Raising Children in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2020) and editor/co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society (Oxford University Press, 2020), Mobile Communication and the Family: Asian Experiences in Technology Domestication (Springer, 2016), and Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge, 2016).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 May 2024 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm |
Accessibility
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