Digital compensation: Smartphone use in the emotion socialisation of left-behind children in rural China

Abstract

Through field investigations in two populous Chinese provinces, this study proposes a grounded theory of digital compensation afforded by smartphone usage in the emotion socialisation of left-behind children. Our interviews found that these children suffer from emotional deficiencies or deficits caused by the absence of parents’ emotional companionship, a lack of emotional education within the family and a decline in playmates in their rural communities. Our study also revealed the dialectical tension between the possibilities and ramifications of digital compensation. In a miniature media ecology constructed by smartphones, migrant parents provide virtual companionship and peers help build social capital, while stay-at-home grandparents perform a scaffolding or gatekeeping role, providing a symbolic sense of emotional compensation. Instead of addressing the root causes of the children’s emotional distress, the compensatory affordances of smartphone use have had concerning consequences of intense feelings of deprivation and social reversal that exacerbate their loneliness and isolation.