The societal anxiety over children's smartphone addiction during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted parents of left-behind children in China to adopt various strategies for remotely domesticating smartphones. This paper advances domestication theory and presents findings from a year-long study of 19 left-behind families from two rural schools in China. The study reveals how smartphone governance has reshaped the spatial order of the household, redefined family roles, and transformed family structures. By using webcams to monitor children's bodies and domestic spaces, assigning stricter and more responsible moral identities to grandparents, and building peer-based family support networks, these families have integrated smartphones as tools of productivity into their everyday life. The research further illustrates how the pandemic has brought modern state governance into the home, profoundly altering traditional models of child-rearing in Chinese families.
Barbosa NevesB.CasimiroC. (Eds.). (2018). Connecting families? Information & communication technologies, generations, and the life course. Policy Press.
2.
BruckermannC. (2020). Why do grandparents grumble? Chinese children’s birthdays between kinship, market, and state. Ethnos, 85(1), 145–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1561486
3.
CarvalhoJ.FranciscoR.RelvasA. P. (2015). Family functioning and information and communication technologies: How do they relate? A literature review. Computers in Human Behavior, 45, 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.11.037
4.
ChenH. (2020). Left-behind children as agents: Mobile media, transnational communication and the mediated family gaze. In Cabañes,J. V. A. Uy-TiocoC. S. (Eds.), Mobile media and social intimacies in Asia: Reconfiguring local ties and enacting global relationships (pp. 133–151). Springer Netherlands.
5.
ChoiS. Y. P.PengY. (2016). Masculine compromise: Migration, family, and gender in China. University of California Press.
ČrničT. O.BrečkoB. N. (2022). Enhancing sociality, self-presentation, and play: A case study of digital scenarios among schoolchildren in an epidemic context. Information, Communication & Society, 25(4), 552–569. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994632
DuckertM.BarkhuusL. (2021). To use or not to use: Mediation and limitation of digital screen technologies within nuclear families. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM international conference on interactive media experiences (pp. 73–83). Association for Computing Machinery.
10.
FoucaultM. (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Harvester Wheatsheaf.
11.
FoucaultM. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan.
12.
GanY. (2023). Choreographing digital love: Materiality, emotionality, and morality in video-mediated communication between Chinese migrant parents and their left-behind children. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 28(3), zmad006. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad006
13.
GlaserB. G. (1965). The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis. Social Problems, 12(4), 436–445. https://doi.org/10.2307/798843
14.
GohE. C.KuczynskiL. (2010). ‘Only children’ and their coalition of parents: Considering grandparents and parents as joint caregivers in urban Xiamen, China. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 13(4), 221–231. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-839X.2010.01314.x
15.
GuanC. Y.TangJ. M.WangM. (2020). The family politics of new media domestication: An ethnographic study of mobile phones’ influences on rural adolescents’ socialization in a central Chinese town. Asian Journal of Communication, 30(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2019.1683753
16.
HaddonL. (2011). Domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life. Canadian Journal of Communication, 36(2), 311–324. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2011v36n2a2322
17.
Helle-ValleJ.SlettemeåsD. (2008). ICTs, domestication and language-games: A Wittgensteinian approach to media uses. New Media & Society, 10(1), 45–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444807085326
18.
Hondagneu-SoteloP.AvilaE. (1997). “I’m here, but I’m there”: The meanings of Latina transnational motherhood. Gender & Society, 11(5), 548–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124397011005003
19.
LehtinenV. (2023). Older adults experiencing and balancing the ambivalences of digitalisation in everyday life: Media repertoires as resources in domesticating emerging technologies. Nordicom Review, 44(1), 123–141. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2023-0007
20.
LeongL. (2023). Configuring the “Cuban internet”: A networked domestication approach 1. In HartmannM. (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of media and technology domestication (pp. 296–312). Routledge.
LieM.SørensenK. (1996). Making technologies our own? Domesticating technology into everyday life. In LieM.SørensenK. (Eds.), Making technologies our own? Domesticating technology into everyday life (pp.1–30). Scandinavian University Press.
23.
LiuN. (2024). CCTV Cameras at home: Temporality experience of surveillance technology in family life. New Media & Society, 27(6), 3699–3719. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241229175(Original work published 2025).
24.
MadianouM.MillerD. (2013). Migration and new media: Transnational families and polymedia. Routledge.
25.
MartinL. L. (2012). Governing through the family: Struggles over US noncitizen family detention policy. Environment and Planning A, 44(4), 866–888. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4477a
26.
NedelcuM. (2017). Transnational grandparenting in the digital age: Mediated co-presence and childcare in the case of Romanian migrants in Switzerland and Canada. European Journal of Ageing, 14, 375–383. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-017-0436-1
27.
ParreñasR. S. (2001). Mothering from a distance: Emotions, gender, and intergenerational relations in Filipino transnational families. Feminist Studies, 27(2), 361–390. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178765
28.
PiersonJ. (2023). Counter-domestication through infrastructural inversion: User empowerment in digital platforms. In HartmannM. (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of media and technology domestication (pp. 266–279). Routledge.
SchmalzbauerL. (2004). Searching for wages and mothering from afar: The case of Honduran transnational families. Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(5), 1317–1331. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-2445.2004.00095.x
31.
Schröder-ButterfillE. (2004). Inter-generational family support provided by older people in Indonesia. Ageing & Society, 24(4), 497–530. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X0400234X
ShiZ. (2023). Monkey King’s golden headband: Domestic surveillance technology as a moral journey in Chinese urban families. Ethnos, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2023.2274297
34.
SilverstoneR.HirschE.MorleyD. (1992). Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household. In HirschE.SilverstoneR. (Eds.), Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces (pp.13–28). Routledge.
35.
SørensenK. H. (2006). Domestication: The enactment of technology. In BerkerT.HartmannM.Punie,Y.WardK. J. (Eds.), Domestication of media and technology (pp. 40–57). Open University Press.
36.
SørensenK. H.AuneM.HatlingM. (2000). Against linearity: On the cultural appropriation of science and technology. In Dierkes,M.von GroteC. (Eds.), Between understanding and trust. The public, science and technology (pp. 237–257). Routledge.
TarrantA. (2012). Grandfathering: The construction of new identities and masculinities. In Arber,S.TimonenV. (Eds.), Contemporary grandparenting (pp. 181–202). Policy Press.
39.
ThirdA.CollinP.WalshL.BlackR. (2019). Young people in digital society: Control shift. Springer Nature.
40.
TurnerJ. (2017). Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(5), 933–950. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817700630
WangQ.ZhengX.ZhangS. (2023). Digital compensation: Smartphone use in the emotion socialisation of left-behind children in rural China. New Media & Society, 27(4), 2434–2454. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231213954.(Original work published 2025)
43.
WaruwuB. K. (2022). Smartphone mothering and mediated family display: Transnational family practices in a polymedia environment among Indonesian mothers in Hong Kong. Mobile Media & Communication, 10(1), 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157921998408
44.
WeberC. (2016). Queer international relations: Sovereignty, sexuality and the will to knowledge. Oxford University Press.
45.
Xinhua News Agency. (2022, February 21). Locked behind the smartphone screen: An investigation into the smartphone addiction phenomenon among some rural left-behind children. http://www.news.cn/politics/2022-02/21/c_1128403440.htm
YngfalkC. (2016). Bio-politicizing consumption: Neo-liberal consumerism and disembodiment in the food marketplace. Consumption Markets & Culture, 19(3), 275–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1102725
48.
ZamanB.NouwenM.VanattenhovenJ.De FerrerreE.LooyJ. V. (2016). A qualitative inquiry into the contextualized parental mediation practices of young children’s digital media use at home. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2015.1127240
