By Rachel Murphy and Gaohui Wu
Zhangmei was a 36-year-old rural-to-urban migrant worker who lived with her husband and her 13-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter in a provincial capital in central China. Zhangmei worked six days a week at a stall and her husband worked seven days a week at least twelve hours a day in a parcel depot. They worked family-unfriendly hours to meet the high costs of purchasing an urban apartment, necessary for their children to attend decent schools in the city, and to pay for their children’s tutoring and family living costs. Meanwhile, low minimum wages pushed the couple to do overtime to meet these costs.
Resembling many working migrant mothers, Zhangmei sought to support her children by investing money and time in their education, practicing a localised ideal of “intensive mothering”. Her aim was to elevate her children above a rural migrant status by equipping them for a decent future in the competitive host city. But how can mothers like Zhangmei supervise their children while spending long hours at work, with no family networks to support childcare? In our recent article in Gender & Society, we discuss how a subset of working migrant mothers like Zhangmei used home CCTV and smartwatches to do what we call maternal time stretching, which involves mothers’ efforts to make their time at work stretch to also cover meeting their responsibilities in their domestic worlds.
These women’s use of home security cameras and smartwatches marks a notable shift in their mothering practices: Home security cameras and smartwatches differ from the webcams and smartphones that have received most attention in research about mothering and migration because of their explicit surveillant functions alongside their communications affordances. Home CCTV enables the viewers to see what is happening in real-time in front of the camera’s wide-angle lens from a smartphone app. Customers can also retrieve 7 days of recorded CCTV footage. Meanwhile, children’s smartwatches are wrist-worn devices with location monitoring, geo–ring-fencing, and route history records as well as audio or video calling. Mothers opt for smartwatches rather than smartphones because of parental and school concerns to keep children away from internet browsers.
We interviewed 22 working rural migrant women who had at least one child aged 7-14 years living with them or else apart from them, and who were based in cities in Hunan and Hubei, central China. Of the 22 mothers, eight were what we call “active digital mothers”. “Active digital mothers” used home CCTV and smartwatches in a complementary fashion: the former to supervise their children while they were inside the home, and the latter to stay connected to their children when the children were outside the home. These mothers all had high aspirations for their children’s education and invested in online and in-person tutoring for them. At the same time, these mothers felt that they had to manage significant childcare gaps while not having a grandmother co-resident with the children to help.
The active digital mothers used home CCTV and smartwatches to accomplish three aspects of intensive mothering. First, they used the devices to meet expectations that mothers are constantly accessible to their children. Xiaochu, the mother of a 10-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy whose husband worked as a courier in another city said that their home CCTV with its intercom and alarm button meant that her children always knew she was there for them: If they needed to talk to her while she was working at the nearby clothes factory, they could shout at the camera, making her smartphone ring. Second, mothers aimed to protect their children’s safety. They checked that their child had arrived home from school on the smartwatch location tracking app, but if their child had forgotten to wear their smartwatch, mothers would look at the home CCTV app to check that they were home. Third, mothers used the home CCTV to foster children’s good habits in study and daily life, which is integral to education-focused intensive mothering. They leveraged their children’s awareness that they could be under surveillance to try to compel them to exercise self-discipline. Mothers encountered resistance from their children over such cameras monitoring, but their aspirations for their children’s education fortified their resolve.
The high normalization of digital monitoring notwithstanding, though, not all mothers accepted the idea of camera monitoring, even when they had no help with childcare. For instance, Yapei, the single mother of a 13-year-old daughter, did not install home CCTV because she worried that the images could be intercepted. Mothers’ use and non-use of home security cameras therefore both aligned with maternal commitments to protect their children.
Active digital monitoring has arisen in circumstances where marketization and family nuclearization have intersected with gender norms to continue to make mothers mostly responsible for childcare. Concurrently, localized neoliberal feminist narratives encourage individual women to be innovative, flexible and efficient by consuming products to help them navigate their dual childcare and paid work responsibilities. Like advertised toys that purport to entertain and soothe children without claiming mothers’ time, the normalized use of mass-marketed, low-cost monitoring technologies obscures the long hours that many children spend without direct adult interaction, and the structural reasons for strains on mothers’ time.
Rachel Murphy is Professor of Chinese Development and Society at the University of Oxford. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, England. Her research examines migration, gender, technology, and family change in China.
Gaohui Wu is Lecturer in Public Administration, Central South University. He has a PhD in Management from Zhongshan University, China. His research focuses on poverty alleviation, governance, and social policy in China.