Unpaid digital care work: Unmasking the parental mediation practices of contemporary mothers

Abstract

As primary carers of children, mothers provide a central role in mediating and negotiating children’s digital media use in the home. In parental mediation research, this work is often reported with a gender-neutral tone, implying both parents play an equal role. This study challenges this bias by unmasking the mediation practices and experiences of mothers. Qualitative interviews revealed mediation is bound by maternal desires to protect, guide and educate children in their media use. The intensity of this care role, often conducted in parallel with other unpaid and paid work, also leads mothers to deploy self-satisfying strategies that facilitate repose. The study illustrates how the gendered role and experience of mothering influences the mediation strategies mothers’ use and argues for broader recognition of these nuanced practices in parental mediation research. It also discusses the implications and impact of parental mediation on the unpaid digital care work of mothers.

Introduction

Contemporary mothering is a complex and labour-intensive role that is exacerbated by children’s use of digital media. In Australia, adoption and use of digital media is high, with 97% of family homes having access to the Internet along with ownership of 7.8 digital devices (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2018a). Tweens and adolescents (children aged 8–17 years) alone own on average 3 devices each (Graham and Sahlberg, 2021).

When COVID-19 caused schools to close, children’s consumption of digital media in the home further increased (Arundell et al., 2021; McClain, 2022). Responsibility for managing this extended use fell to mothers, many of whom had to reduce paid working hours or suspend careers to support children’s online schooling (Alon et al., 2020; Heggeness and Fields, 2020; Savage, 2020). Mothers’ contribution to the unpaid labour market during this time increased the cognitive and emotional workload of mothers (Dean et al., 2022), amplifying existing gender inequalities in how work is perceived and performed in the workplace and at home (Auðardóttir and Rúdólfsdóttir, 2020).

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development defines unpaid care work as unpaid because ‘the individual performing this activity is not remunerated’; a care role that includes providing ‘what is necessary for the health, well-being, maintenance, and protection of someone or something’, and work that ‘involves mental or physical effort and is costly in terms of time resources’ (Ferrant et al., 2014: 3). In a digital home, which contains a range of computers, laptops, smartphones and other media devices, this definition requires expansion to accommodate the extra work involved in managing children’s digital media use. Such work takes time and intensifies a mother’s care role, yet it is barely perceptible in national statistics about women’s contribution to unpaid care in the home.

In Australia, for example, the average time spent engaged in household labour each week is captured in national census data that asks adults aged over 15 years to indicate their contribution using the categories of Nil, less than 5 hours, 15–29 hours and 30 hours or more (ABS, 2021b). Data from the latest census shows women spend significantly more time undertaking domestic duties than men across all time values except for the Nil category (with 31% of women spending 15 hours or more compared to 13% of men) (ABS, 2022b). However, similar measures of time use are not applied to questions related to caring for children. Instead, census respondents are asked to select ‘yes’ to caring for their own and/or someone else’s child/children or ‘no’ if they do not provide a care role (ABS, 2021a). Failing to record how much time is spent on childcaring activities hides the range and extent of unpaid work mothers perform, including that of digital care.

In Australia, much of this work is performed in addition to and in conjunction with other work, with a majority of mothers (75% of coupled mothers and 81% of single mothers) in paid employment (ABS, 2022a). For these mothers, digital care can be extended through the mobile phone as a form of ‘remote mothering’ as it enables mothers ‘to bridge the space and time gap between the domestic and work worlds’ (Rakow and Navarro, 1993: 153). However, the expectation to be constantly available also creates a ‘double-work’ paradox for mothers (Lim, 2014) in which they feel pressured to perform well across both professional and domestic domains. This mental load, while invisible, more profoundly impacts mothers than fathers (Dean et al., 2022).

In communication and media studies the work of managing children’s media use is referred to as parental mediation. Research in this area is extensive and multidisciplinary and considers the range of active and restrictive strategies parents use to ‘mediate and mitigate the negative effects of media in their children’s lives’ (Clark, 2011: 325). Although studies generally acknowledge mothers’ lead role in caring for children, their specific mediation practices, including reasons why they deploy certain strategies, are often overlooked. Even where mothers comprise the majority sample in these studies, their voices and experiences of mediating children’s media access and use are muffled by the gender-neutral nomenclature of ‘parental mediation’.

This article acknowledges the centrality of mothers in parental mediation. It offers new insights about the nuanced and unique mediation strategies mothers use to manage children’s digital media use—strategies that are intrinsically connected to their gendered role in the home. Through mothers’ lived experiences, this study makes visible the range and intensity of this taken-for-granted digital care work and calls for more research about the impact and consequences of parental mediation for contemporary mothers. In this study, parental mediation provides a lens through which to observe the broad spectrum of work involved in a mother’s digital care role. Only by monitoring and measuring the extent of this work can we obtain a realistic account of mothers’ contribution to unpaid labour.

Literature review

Parental mediation is often driven by a parent’s desire to protect children and to engender safe digital media practices. Various studies in the field emphasise that mediation occurs due to parental concerns about the impact of extended media use on children’s interpersonal development, physical health and concentration (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2016; Dias and Brito, 2018; Page Jeffery, 2020b). Perceived risks of cyberbullying, sexting and sharing personal and private details online (Caivano et al., 2020; Stoilova et al., 2019) are also concerns that motivate parents to deploy different strategies, such as restricting, monitoring or actively engaging in and learning more about children’s online activities.

Restrictive mediation includes setting rules around children’s media use, including what content can be accessed, how long devices can be used for and the appropriate contexts in which this use can occur (Shin and Lwin, 2022). This strategy may also involve using higher degrees of mediation, like digital grounding (Auxier et al., 2020) where devices are confiscated to enforce compliance with the rules (Van Petegem et al., 2019; Warren and Aloia, 2019). Parental monitoring involves supervising children’s media use and deploying technical mediation, which includes installing software that controls or blocks access to certain apps or that monitors children’s media consumption (Livingstone et al., 2017; Page Jeffery, 2020a). Active mediation approaches include talking with children about their media use and researching the content and platforms children are interested in. The discursive and investigative strategies of active mediation provide an ‘opportunity for parents to display responsiveness and mutual respect between parent and child’ (Jiow et al., 2017: 319) which can have a positive impact on children’s media experiences (Clark, 2011).

Some research has highlighted gendered differences in the type and degree of mediation used by mothers and fathers, demonstrating that mothers mediate children’s Internet use more often than fathers and deploy active mediation more by talking with children frequently about their interactions (Festl and Gniewosz, 2019; Warren, 2017). In contrast, other studies emphasise mothers’ deployment of restrictive mediation to limit the number of friends children have on social media and by requesting removal of those considered undesirable (Symons et al., 2017). Parental monitoring is also used by mothers to carry out surveillance of children’s media activities, such as asking siblings and relatives to ‘friend’ and follow their children on social media or by friending children themselves (Page Jeffery, 2020a). These studies demonstrate that mothers apply a range of strategies to manage children’s media use, but how these mediation practices affect, and are affected by, a mother’s role and responsibilities, is unknown.

The digital learning policies of schools for example, may require mothers to moderate their mediation role to increase opportunities for children’s online learning. As COVID-19 emphasised, one of the challenges for mothers of facilitating children’s digital schoolwork was the need to help children avoid the distractions of gaming apps and other online media content (Graham and Sahlberg, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). This work involves additional supervision and monitoring which increases the parental load and may undermine parents’ mediation practices (Graham and Sahlberg, 2021; Page Jeffery, 2022). Negotiating and managing children’s media use for school purposes may have a bigger impact on the parental mediation practices of mothers as they are assumed to be ‘“natural” teachers of their children and thus responsible for their academic, social and emotional competency’ (Smythe and Isserlis, 2002: 2).

The pedagogical work of mothers is often performed in addition to paid employment, which can be a cause of tension that also influences mediation practices. Some research shows, for example, that heightened levels of stress and time-pressure among employed mothers can result in increased media use by children, an effect that is reversed when mothers feel more in control of professional work (Beyens and Eggermont, 2017; Warren and Aloia, 2019). Adopting a strategy of distant mediation or instrumental deployment of children’s media use (Nikken, 2019; Zaman et al., 2016) could therefore provide an important coping strategy for time-poor mothers. Deployment of instrumental strategies, such as initiating children’s use, or suspending restrictive measures to allow increased media use, are examples of self-interested mediation because they support the emotional and physical needs of both parents and children (Geurts et al., 2022; Nikken, 2019). For employed mothers who return home to embark on ‘the second-shift’ of unpaid care work (Hochschild, 2012), such a strategy may be especially pertinent.

The body of research outlined above suggests mothers’ mediation practices may be impacted by external and structural factors that impose and impede on their management of children’s media use. Nonetheless, mothers’ contribution to this cognitive and digital labour continues to outweigh that of fathers, labour that involves thinking about children’s offline and online welfare, anticipating their needs and seeking online parental support and information (Daminger, 2019; Peng, 2022). Lim (2020: 5) refers to such work as ‘transcendent parenting’, a contemporary condition that describes how ‘parenting duties are on an endless loop, where parents parent relentlessly, with little or no chance for a meaningful respite’. According to Lim (2018, 2020), parental mediation extends beyond making decisions about how, when and which digital media children can consume, to include being attuned to the virtual and interpersonal dynamics children have with friends and the symbolic role that digital media play in forging and threatening these social relations. Transcendent parenting then highlights the intensive and all-encompassing work involved in digital labour and expands the lens of parental mediation research to consider how children’s contextual use of media impacts parental experiences (Lim, 2020). Like parental mediation, however, the nomenclature used to describe it fails to acknowledge that mothers, more than fathers, provide this omnipresent role.

It is evident from this literature that parental mediation is a dynamic practice that requires significant investment to support and facilitate children’s safe and responsible media use. Some research points to strategies that may be of more benefit to mothers, but understanding how these approaches intersect with their primary role in raising children requires further exploration. This article contributes to parental mediation literature by exposing the nuanced and gendered experiences of mothers’ mediation practices and illustrates the impact of this work on their unpaid digital care role.

Method

This qualitative study used a snowballing technique to recruit and interview mothers about their experiences managing children’s digital media use. Snowballing is a method commonly adopted in other studies with mothers (e.g. Beyens and Eggermont, 2017). Interviews were conducted with 17 mothers of children aged 9–16 years living in Adelaide, Australia. The in-depth, semi-structured interviews were carried out in participants’ homes in 2016 and lasted 30–90 minutes.

Collectively, participants had 32 children and 27 of these were within the sampling range. Seventeen of these were boys and 10 were girls with an average age of 12 years and 11.5 years respectively. The majority of mothers were aged 42–49 years and were relatively homogeneous in their cultural representation as white, heterosexual women in established co-parenting relationships. All participants lived in owner-occupied dwellings supported by at least one full-time income. Participants had a higher percentage of university-level education than the national average for women aged 18–64 (30.8%; ABS, 2016) with almost 60% holding a Bachelor’s degree or above. Four participants held management positions, two had technical or administrative roles, two worked in childcare, two were nurses, two were self-employed, and two were unemployed at the time of the interviews but were seeking employment. One was a teacher, one worked in hospitality, and one was a full-time undergraduate student. Specific diversity criteria, such as LGBTQI mothers, those with disabilities, or mothers raising children alone were not identified. The sample selection was based on, and was thus determined by, the diversity of participants obtained via snowballing. Of the 17 women interviewed, only one identified as a non-biological mother.

Data management and research processes were compliant with university protocols and approved by the institution’s ethics committee. To protect participants’ identities and those of family members, real names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

Reflexive thematic analysis was used to interpret interview data, which involves five stages of analysis: familiarisation of data, generating codes, generating themes, revising themes, and defining themes to ‘tell the overall story’ of the research (Braun et al., 2019: 856). Data familiarisation occurred during transcription of interviews and manual coding to look for evidence of the mediation strategies mothers used and any connecting points in mothers’ experiences. Transcripts were imported into NVivo for further analysis and codes were initially categorised under the parental mediation strategies of ‘active’, ‘restrictive’, ‘permissive’ and ‘parental monitoring’. Data that reflected more than one strategy was coded to multiple categories. Using a framework matrix in NVivo it was possible to cross-reference coded data across all transcripts to look for common themes in mothers’ mediation practices.

This holistic approach revealed specific motivations or reasons why mothers deploy different strategies and initial themes of ‘managing use’, ‘facilitating use’ and ‘coordinating use’ were created. As these themes were further analysed and refined, they revealed a more specific set of contexts in which mothers’ mediate children’s media use. These four themes, discussed in the next section, are specific to mothers’ experiences and reveal the gendered dimensions of parental mediation. The narrative theme that binds together these experiences is that the labour-intensive work of parental mediation has a significant cognitive and affective impact on the unpaid care role of contemporary mothers.

Unmasking the unpaid digital care work of mothers

Mediation is often driven by parental desires to protect, guide and educate children, but for the participants in this study, practices are bound by their role and identity as mothers. Restrictive strategies, for example, are often motivated by a maternal need to ‘do what is right’ by children, which includes being proactive in their supervision and management of children’s media use. Similarly, active mediation strategies can be provoked by a sense of duty in which mothers feel obliged to support children’s digital literacy and learning and to leverage opportunities for children’s digital media use. In both instances, mothers are tethered to children’s digital and online activities. This digital care work is intense, constant and unyielding, and takes a physical and emotional toll on mothers, as the following accounts reveal.

Protective strategies

Mothers expend considerable energy thinking about and mitigating the risks associated with children’s digital media use. However, the strategies they used to achieve these goals appeared to be more protective than restrictive in intention.

The deployment of safety mediation in the form of installing and establishing security protocols and monitoring children’s digital media activity was perceived by many mothers as an essential part of their role in supporting and building children’s digital resilience. Pat (15-year-old son), for example, described herself as a ‘human firewall’ regulating and monitoring her son’s digital media use. Computer firewalls restrict access to information to prevent harmful content from affecting networks and it seems mothers apply similar strategies to protect children from risky media use, as Pat illustrates:

I set up pretty much anything they want. The boys come ask me about a website and I go ‘What do they want. What am I signing?’ If it asks for a credit card number I go, ‘Well let’s have a look and see if this is a scam’. So, we check and I say, ‘Is this a scam?’ and they say ‘Yes it is’ and then we go ‘Phew!’ They don’t have a credit card now but there will be a time when they do, and so they will learn one day not to put their credit card details into anything.

Pat combined an active strategy with safety mediation to teach her children how to scrutinise Internet content, which bolsters safe online practices and encourages self-regulated behaviour.

Several mothers in this study deployed similar security filters to control the flow of information to children, establishing protocols around the use of digital media. Emily, for instance, ‘friends’ her children on social media because it not only enables her to monitor their online interactions, but it also provides a gateway into their worlds: ‘I have an Instagram account so I can keep an eye on things and see my sons’ friends’ stuff too. I’ve got more insight now into the different relationships they have that I wouldn’t have without Instagram’. Emily’s surveillance filter provides oversight about her children’s online activities, but its light touch mostly functions as a source of comfort, helping her feel more connected to her children’s lives.

Sometimes, firewalls were inadequately applied to children’s digital media use which resulted in anxiety and guilt among mothers. Describing an incident involving her son, Nicky (12-year-old daughter, 10-year-old son) highlights the intense emotion involved in digital care work:

I hadn’t set up parental controls on the iPads properly and they were all set up under my name with no restrictions. Jay can’t have anything 12+ so, if he wants a new App he has to seek my permission first, even for free apps, and that was the problem—I had his account set to ‘don’t need permission for free apps’ and so he just went in and downloaded some really inappropriate adult content. Of course, I’m panicking thinking ‘Oh my God my child is looking at this sort of stuff and he’s too young’, but it didn’t take too much searching to find out that’s exactly the age when they start becoming curious.

For some mothers, harder, more restrictive measures were necessary to control unwanted behaviours associated with children’s digital media use. Geraldine (daughters aged 10 and 12 years), for example, felt she had no choice but to block her 12-year-old daughter’s iPad access following breaches of trust: ‘Amanda doesn’t have access to the Apple ID account because we’ve had an issue with her buying things and spending money’. Her daughter would often ‘sneak out in the middle of the night and take the iPad into her room’ resulting in Geraldine confiscating her daughter’s devices at night-time and storing them under her bed. The prohibitive approach taken by Geraldine was rare among the sample of mothers, but it appears to have been enforced as a last, exhaustive effort to preserve family cohesion.

Brokering strategies

In addition to the work mothers do to protect and guide children in their media use, digital care work includes negotiating the terms of children’s media access with sceptical partners. Carol (11-year-old son), for instance, spoke about her husband’s disinterest in digital media and his ‘old-school’ attitudes about parenting, childhood and learning. His ambivalence about digital technologies had resulted in minimal ownership of devices (1 desktop computer, 1 mobile phone and Carol’s recently acquired smartphone). Despite admitting to having a low level of digital literacy herself, she lobbies her husband to change his thinking:

Because he’s not up with technology, he doesn’t understand how things work or the advantage they can be for them. He just sees another screen that they’re sitting there looking at instead of being outside and I’m not quite as strict as that. I can see more of the benefits of them whereas I’ve got to try and convince him of that coz he’s not up, he’s just very old-school and he’s not interested in technology. He likes to keep things simple and basic.

Carol’s comments illustrate an expanding area of digital care work that involves her brokering access to digital media for her children. Olivia (12-year-old son, 13-year-old daughter) spoke about a similar challenge with her husband:

We are different you know. I’m stricter than other parents but he is even stricter and so it’s making sure that I respect his wishes, but I don’t sacrifice my own ideas about things. . . . [children] have to use their devices, it’s part of their social structure. I don’t know if he’s forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager, but friends are everything when you are a teenager and if you are out of touch with them even for five hours that can be disastrous, and so I think that, you know, I am a bit more understanding of that psychological sort of side of things, so I am a little bit softer.

Olivia emphasises her active involvement in advocating for her children’s digital needs, and implies she is more cognisant of and responsive to the role digital media plays in her children’s social worlds than her husband.

Kitty’s situation also highlights her primary role in mediating her children’s media use via management of her partner’s expectations. Following a period of unruly behaviour by her 9-year-old son, Kitty had instituted restrictive measures to limit his use of media during weekdays. These measures, she reported, had helped ‘bring calm to the household’. However, during school holidays—which saw a break in the usual weekly routine—she felt it necessary to reassert her role as arbiter of her son’s media use:

He [husband] would say things like, ‘Josh has been a really good boy lately and we’re all very tired, perhaps he is allowed to have the iPad in his bed tonight’, so I had to re-educate my husband because he would reward him by bending the rules and that would make it harder . . . so I’m trying to reinforce, you know, reward him absolutely but don’t reward him by bending the rules because the minute we do, tomorrow night will be a carry on.

In contrast to Carol and Isobel who tried to broker opportunities for media use with partners, Kitty appeals to her husband to reinforce her rules that limit their son’s use. As the parent who experiences, firsthand, the consequences of a disrupted routine, Kitty’s restrictive mediation enables amelioration of her care role. Nonetheless, all three women share a deep understanding of their children’s needs and their responsibility for exerting parental expertise vis-a-vis children’s digital media use. Their testaments emphasise the cognitive load of mothers and highlight that mediation is intrinsically tied to their digital care role.

Pedagogical strategies

Granting children access to digital media use is not always given willingly but is conceded in response to school demands. Digital homework tasks, for example, require children to be granted access to devices for learning, regardless of parental attitudes or rules about digital media use. While mothers have long been associated with facilitating children’s social, emotional and cognitive learning, including supervising traditional, paper-based homework (Smythe and Isserlis, 2002), management of digital homework requires additional labour from mothers.

Key issues identified by participants was how to keep children focused on schoolwork when using multi-modal devices and the challenge of discerning between children’s use of digital media for learning or for leisure. Louise (16-year-old son) highlights these difficulties and exhibits frustration about relinquishing protective mediation strategies to accommodate her son’s learning requirements:

Hugo is very, very studious, he’s a very hard worker but it’s mixed up with social media or YouTube being on the screen. I can say ‘I’m turning off the Internet, that’s it’, but then he can’t do any homework because he might be on Google Docs with someone else, so it’s really hard to say, ‘That’s it’.

Louise explains her son ‘gets stressed if he’s not working’ on his computer, and so she faces the dilemma of limiting her son’s media use while also balancing his pedagogical and well-being needs.

For Barbara (sons aged 11 and 14 years), increased expectations that her older son will use digital media for school-related work means he ‘is in his room doing that rather than being outside’ as she would prefer. Anita (sons aged 10 and 13 years) echoed similar concerns:

I always had a period of at least an hour in the evening when they had to put down their devices and go outside to play. But Adrian’s (11) got to use his iPad for homework, so sometimes when I say, ‘now’s the time you’re doing homework’ or ‘playing outside’, so no device use, well, Adrian’s got to pick up his iPad to do his homework, so he’s still on it.

Despite concerns that ‘study keeps drawing them back to their devices’ (Louise), these mothers felt obliged to deploy a pedagogical strategy of mediation, supervising children’s homework to ensure they avoided social disturbances. Geraldine highlighted the challenges involved in this additional work:

Amanda [12] has a lot of friends who are obviously on their devices a lot of the time, a lot of the day, so they’re always texting. . .So, she gets distracted is the upshot, and we make her come out here [kitchen] when we need to, we make her come out here and do her homework at the bench. So, we try to monitor it, but we can’t physically see the screen, and we know that she gets distracted from time to time, so it’s something we’re constantly trying to manage all the time.

Physical supervision was rarely indicated as part of a mother’s digital care role, perhaps because children were on average 13 years-old and were developing more autonomy in their media use. The findings nonetheless highlight the challenge felt by mothers in enabling children use of digital media for learning, while simultaneously preventing its inappropriate use for leisure.

In other cases, mothers embraced opportunities to inform themselves of children’s media interests and discussed the implications of media use with children before deploying mediation. Jemima (10-year-old son, 12-year-old daughter), for example, demonstrated investigative mediation (Jiow et al., 2017) by researching the benefits of Snapchat before determining whether to allow her daughter access to it:

My daughter [12 years] wants to get Snapchat and other things which I think she’s too young for, so she hasn’t been allowed to have it, but I need to get my head around it, so I am kind of trying to invest in it a little bit just to educate myself before she is allowed access to it. And I think it’s important, as a parent, to know what they are looking at, know what they’re looking into.

In Rhiannon’s case, her love of video gaming, which she shares with her sons (aged 12 and 16 years), provides frequent opportunities for active mediation using discursive strategies:

I am aware that I have got these two boys, one of whom is about to become a teenager, one who is a teenager, who are very much part of the gaming community, and that testosterone and all that becomes an issue. And I don’t want them to become those horrible people that are seen and read about that think that they have more right to play a game than a girl does, so we talk a lot about that stuff.

As a woman, a gamer and importantly a mother, Rhiannon is acutely aware of the responsibility she has for teaching her sons about gaming etiquette, instilling in them the importance of perceiving and treating female gamers as equals. Such an awareness highlights another distinctly maternal feature of parental mediation.

Nicky also maximises opportunities to learn with and from her children through dialogue about their online interactions. As her daughter (aged 13) ventures into social media, Nicky actively and positively engages in her daughter’s media use:

I think you just have to keep an open discussion all the time, there is no end to it. We talk about what she is talking about on Snapchat and Instagram every day, she doesn’t think it is unusual for me to ask what is happening because I ask all of the time . . . So yeah, constant discussion I think is really important for the children.

These experiences show that pedagogical strategies are often deployed as a collaborative venture that both support mothers’ engagement and participation in children’s media use and help children to become responsible digital citizens.

Self-satisfying strategies

The final mediation approach mothers use to manage children’s media use reflects what others have identified as self-interest—where children are encouraged to use media to fulfil the emotional needs of both parents and children (Geurts et al., 2022; Nikken, 2019). Strategies like digitally tagging children via text message when physically distanced from them is an intrinsic part of a mother’s care role. By encouraging children to carry and check mobile phones regularly, many mothers deployed instrumental strategies of media use. For instance, school pick-ups could be easily coordinated, and mothers felt reassured about children’s safety when they began to travel independently:

I had to give them a phone so that if I was running late, I could just send them a message (Pat, 15-year-old son)

He was given a mobile phone so he could send a text message to say he was on the bus, that was pretty much all he would write, ‘On the bus’, but I knew he was ok (Barbara, 14-year-old son)

My daughter recently started catching the bus home, so we’d given her a phone so that we knew she was okay (Jemima, 10-year-old son, 12-year-old daughter)

The use of phrases like ‘I had to give them a phone’ and ‘I knew s/he was ok’ highlight the highly affective and deeply symbolic role mobile phones have in binding mothers to children, supporting and extending their ability to nurture and protect children from afar.

To some extent, these findings suggest the capacity for the mobile phone to enrich a mother’s care role by facilitating a constant connection to children. Yet, at the same time, children who forget to take their phone, or do not answer messages immediately, can invoke untold anxieties on mothers. Olivia spoke about the emotional impact caused by a severed digital umbilical cord when her 12-year-old son forgot to take his phone on a long bike ride:

His chain fell off and so he had to walk back in the dark, and we were like ‘Where is he?’ We had to walk in the streets to find him and when I found him I said, ‘Why didn’t you take your phone?’ and he said ‘I forgot’ and he was so upset and angry. He knew his way, but he had to walk, so it took him ages and it was dark. When I found him, I was like ‘Dude, your phone’.

The insistence demonstrated by these mothers that children carry mobile phones highlights their perceived importance for contemporary mothering and provides evidence that mothers intentionally mediate children’s access to satisfy their own maternal needs.

These strategies of virtual nurturing can, however, have a paradoxical effect by exacerbating the cognitive and emotional load of mothers. Perhaps to ameliorate these tensions, mothers also deploy reclamation strategies, often initiating children’s use of digital media to manage the competing pressures of balancing paid employment with unpaid care work. For Anita, who works 3 days a week, allowing her 9-year-old son increased access to his iPad during moments of heightened stress helped her avoid disharmony between her other children while also allowing her time for herself:

I suppose sometimes you take the easy option, don’t you? And I’m like, ‘Here have it’, coz he’s either interfering with what his brother is doing and causing trouble there, or he’ll just constantly be needing you to do things with him. I know it shouldn’t be like that, but it is when you just want to sit down and go ‘Eurgh!’ for 5 minutes.

Anita encourages her son’s use of digital media because it provides an opportunity to claim psychological space from the intensive work involved in managing his ‘full on’ needs. As other studies have shown, this kind of permissive mediation strategy is commonly deployed by parents of younger children to help regulate their behaviour (Geurts et al., 2022). However, Anita’s case highlights that mediation can be motivated by the simultaneous need to maintain family cohesion while avoiding maternal burnout.

Several other mothers indicated that more laissez-faire approaches to children’s digital media use helped support their emotional and physical needs. Kitty, who has a toddler and a 9-year-old-son, works part-time and, as mentioned earlier, imposed a complete media ban throughout the week because she felt his media consumption was affecting his behaviour. During the weekend however, these rules are abandoned in exchange for rest from the usual weekly routine:

I was trying to teach him that during the week it’s about school and learning and the jobs you need to do and not playtime. But the weekend is a free-for-all. He is allowed whatever. If he wants to go in his room for 15 hours and watch whatever then he can!

Carol also implied that weekday rituals that restrict digital media use are lifted during weekends. Although Carol’s children only have access to a family computer and television, these media technologies have become an important resource that aids her respite. Imagining weekends without a television she said: ‘I’d be saying ‘Sleep in! You can’t get up yet!’. I honestly don’t know how parents that say ‘No TV in the mornings’ do it. That just wouldn’t work for us’.

In instances where children needed time to unwind, some mothers also adopted more lenient mediation approaches. Nicky, for example, explained the benefits of allowing increased media access during weekends to her 10-year-old son who has dyslexia: ‘There are some weekends when he is just so drained that he might spend on and off up to 6 hours during the day on a device or watching telly’. Rhiannon, too, spoke of the supportive approach she adopts in support of her 16-year old who is on the autism spectrum: ‘He needs some downtime from structure or he we will end up with meltdowns’. As others have found, instrumentally omitting or relinquishing restrictive mediation to help pacify children can be beneficial to their welfare (Geurts et al., 2022; Zaman et al., 2016). The inherent responsibility felt by Nicky and Rhiannon to protect and preserve their sons’ well-being resulted in similar strategies of mediation being deployed.

Conclusion

This article has uncovered the intense work of mothering in a digital home where mothers constantly think about, negotiate and discuss digital media use with children and partners. The way mothers in this study have inserted themselves into every aspect of children’s lives resonates with Lim’s (2018, 2020) ideas about transcendent parenting. The findings, however, reveal a new and more complex dynamic related to this role—one that is enacted through a mother’s gender, identity, and deep-rooted sense of maternal responsibility.

The work of transcending children’s online and offline worlds is performed by mothers in addition to, and alongside, paid employment, domestic chores, and other unpaid care tasks. Many mothers in this study seemingly accepted these multiple responsibilities, despite the intensive mothering required to manage children’s changing digital needs, perhaps indicating self-awareness of the expectations related to their role. The energy invested by mothers when mediating children’s media use implies a stretching and intensification of contemporary mothering that extends beyond a generic notion of transcendent parenting. Rather, mothers’ use of mediation strategies in response to different contexts of use and to support and reinforce their emotional and maternal needs reveal hidden depths to mothers’ digital care work.

The nuanced practices of mothers, however, are rarely acknowledged in parental mediation literature. The gender-neutral bias of much research has overshadowed the fact that management of children’s media use is a predominantly maternal practice that mothers have embodied as part of their unpaid care role. This article, therefore, provides a novel contribution to the field by highlighting the gendered challenges, benefits, and nuances of mediating children’s digital media use from a mother’s perspective. It also expands the scope of research by laying foundations to further explore the intersection of parents’ perceptions, negotiations, and constructions of parental roles with their mediation practices.

By demonstrating how parental mediation increases the range and intensity of a mother’s unpaid care role, this article also contributes to social policy. As previously noted, national time use surveys and workforce participation studies consistently show mothers spend more time engaged in unpaid care work compared to men, even as the hours they spend in paid employment increases (cf. ABS, 2018b, 2020; Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), 2016). To obtain a clearer and more realistic assessment of the diverse ways mothers contribute to the labour force in Australia, future time use studies should track and measure the time mothers spend managing children’s digital media use. Government policies also have a role in alleviating some of the pressures placed on mothers by enabling more equitable working conditions for both parents that facilitate fairer distribution of domestic and digital labour. In addition, policies that better support gender equality could help change social norms and assumptions regarding a mother’s role in the home.

Parental mediation research can contribute to this agenda by exposing, as this study has, the unique experiences and practices of mothers. The data collected from this relatively small sample of mothers revealed intimate insights about their mediation practices and the multifaceted factors that influence these. Exploring these issues are important for understanding the broader social impact that digital media use has on contemporary mothering. Nonetheless, studies that report findings from ‘parents’, rather than mothers, silence these perspectives. It may be necessary to change the way parental mediation is conceptualised and operationalised so that research is more inclusive, and representative of mothers and their digital care work.