Out and About

This chapter discusses parents’ use of mobile media to enhance their children’s personal safety. There is an extensive slate of mobile communication features, customized apps and services that parents now actively tap to monitor their children’s whereabouts, or to simply have a sense of their well-being. Mobile media such as live webcam feeds, CCTV cameras, and location-tracking services and apps have effectively enabled parents to keep track of their children even when they are physically apart. As children grow older, parental oversight continues through ceaseless mobile connections and even an extended parental surveillance network. Parents of teens and emerging adults also tend to use their children’s social media footprints to undertake subtle and covert surveillance.

At School

This chapter focuses on transcendent parenting practices and young people’s lives in relation to academic matters. Shifting away from the traditional face-to-face teacher-parent meetings and phone calls, home-school conferencing via mobile apps has become increasingly prevalent. This includes the use of homework-reminder apps, school attendance tracking apps, online gradebooks, or homework-helper apps and other services that specifically cater to the needs of home-school conferencing. Beyond such custom home-school conferencing apps and services, generic social networking apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook are also increasingly used by schools, parents, and children in the service of children’s academic pursuits. This growing multitude of ways in which parents can be connected to their children’s teachers and to other parents, and the mediated platforms by which parents can be directly involved in their children’s learning, have created vast possibilities for transcendent parenting, thus exacerbating the parental burden both online and offline.

Mobile Communication and Transcendent Parenting

This chapter enunciates how mobile media have engendered the conditions for transcendent parenting practices to emerge, thereby transforming family life in Asian urban middle-class households. It argues that although mothers generally seem to be more involved in their transcendent parenting duties, a more desirable state of shared transcendent parenting between fathers and mothers will ultimately alter the practice of transcendent parenting. It also discusses how the Singapore-focused transcendent parenting experiences in this book are relevant to urban middle-class societies in other parts of the world. Finally, it highlights the negotiation of the consequences of transcendent parenting.

At Play

This chapter analyzes transcendent parenting and young people’s social interactions. As parents are deeply concerned about their children’s contact risks, they can and do become heavily involved in their children’s peer interactions online and offline. Parents can use the digital trail of their children’s mobile media communication, install parental control apps in their children’s phones, or confiscate their children’s phones and scan the phones’ content to gain insights into their children’s social interactions to offer guidance. They may even confront the children for behaviors they deem inappropriate, or advocate on behalf of their children in disputes involving other children and their parents and even teachers. Such parental intervention, however, can deny young people valuable opportunities for learning to interpret social situations, to acquire greater autonomy in problem-solving, and to manage their online and offline personae.

At Home

This chapter focuses on transcendent parenting practices and young people’s lives in the home setting in Singapore. It discusses how parents perceive their multifaceted roles as principal nurturers, disciplinarians, teachers, friends, counsellors, advocates, and even managers of their children to ensure that their children have the best material conditions and socioemotional support at home to help them thrive in their academic pursuits to attain future social mobility, security, and comfort. Such hefty parenting aspirations and duties are especially manifested and explicated through their use of mobile media, their mediation of the children’s technology use, and the varied ways in which mobile communication shapes their family practices, habits, and routines for the purpose of creating a healthy and child-friendly home media use environment.

Parenting Today

This chapter identifies the key priorities among parents of Asia’s urban middle-class families. The three key priorities are inculcating values in their children to ensure positive maturation, exercising oversight and supervision over them to protect them from harm and adverse influence, and providing support for their children’s academic achievement for future success. This chapter also reviews existing literature on the sociology of parenting and parenting trends that influence and are influenced by transcendent parenting. Parenting concepts such as intensive parenting, concerted cultivation, and paranoid parenting will also be analyzed in relation to transcendent parenting.

Transcendent Parenting and the Media-Rich Household

This first chapter introduces the concept of transcendent parenting and how it emerges out of the media-rich household in Asia. It defines transcendent parenting—what constitutes it and how it is manifested in parenting practices through always on, always available mobile media. It then covers the landscape of media use in urban middle-class households in Asia, from China to South Korea to Vietnam, with a focus on Singapore. This is followed by a discussion on typical media-use patterns throughout the child’s life, from preschool to emerging adulthood. It ends with an outline of the remaining book chapters.