Unseen Sacrifices: Exploring the Unpaid Labor Moms Invest in Their Children’s Digital Worlds
In recent years, “emotional labor” has come to be synonymous with invisible gender disparities in housework, childcare, and social interactions. Nonetheless, research published in June suggests that mothers may have to supervise and manage their children’s digital lives.
In a study published in the journal New Media & Society, an Australian researcher reviewed existing literature and conducted interviews with 17 mothers of children aged 9 to 16 to learn more about “unpaid digital care work.”
The mothers, who were all heterosexual co-parents, intervened in their children’s technology use, performing work that was “intense, constant and unyielding, and takes a physical and emotional toll on mothers.”
They discussed spending a great deal of time and effort on their children’s digital use, focusing on the potential perils of online engagement, frauds, and other threats, and establishing rules and boundaries for how their children use computers and mobile devices.
This labor also included “negotiating the terms of children’s media access with skeptical partners” who were either ambivalent about allowing their children to use social media and other technologies, or permissive regarding their children’s digital media consumption.
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The Dual Role of Digital Devices: Bridging and Straining Parent-Child Connections
Overall, the analysis revealed that mothers attempted to remain informed about their children’s screen time usage and to shape them into “responsible digital citizens.”
Despite the frustrations and effort involved in monitoring digital media use, many parents told the researcher that they viewed the phone as a means to remain in touch with their children and keep them safe and occupied. However, this “digital umbilical cord” can also cause anxiety, such as when children fail to respond to text messages or forget their phones.
Fae Heaselgrave, a communications researcher and lecturer at the University of South Australia who conducted the study, said in a news release, ““The increased use of digital devices is having a bigger impact on mums in terms of demanding more time, energy and mental and cognitive work, which can also affect their career choices and paid work patterns.”
She says that more research is required to determine how much neglected and unrecognized time mothers devote to their children’s digital care and the role it plays in parenting.
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Source: Washington Post
