Abstract
Chapter 6 explores parents’ and grandparents’ engagement with new media as part of their practices regarding the management of children’s health problems and risks. This chapter explores how their engagement with the new media and other civic activities may shape their sense of agency and empowerment, enabling them to form a collective parental identity with shared interests and responsibilities, and to contest certain dominant prescriptions of children’s healthcare practices. It analyses how parents and grandparents use the new media to search for (alternative) healthcare information; how they use peer networks to seek recognition, support and guidance; how they express their moral and political concerns via the social media sites, demanding greater accountability from both the market and the government. Finally, it also analyses how limited social, political and civic rights in China circumscribe the avenues for parents and grandparents to form a parent-citizen identity through formal collective actions.
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- 1.
‘Sina, QQ, Sohu’ are popular web portals that usually have a page/pages on topics about mothers and infants.
- 2.
Baidu is one of the most popular search engines in China: 90.3% of Chinese internet users used Baidu in 2014 (CNNIC 2015, p. 45)
- 3.
This, of course, requires verification by further research.
- 4.
The subscription numbers are usually used by verified profitable or unprofitable organisations. These numbers can be obtained from media service providers, for example, Tencent, QQ or WeChat.
- 5.
Baby death associated with hepatitis B vaccination was reported in China in 2013 (Watson 2013).
- 6.
QQ is also an instant messaging software service operating in China.
- 7.
Mothers also reported that hospitals leaked their phone numbers to infant formula sales representatives (Gong and Jackson 2013, p. 304).
- 8.
Extended breastfeeding, together with other practices such as feed-on-demand, co-sleeping and baby wearing, is a key element of attachment parenting which is defined as ‘a child-centric parenting technique in which children’s needs are ideally met on the child’s schedule rather than that of the parent’ (Liss and Erchull 2012, p. 132). The scientific underpinning for attachment parenting is Bowlby’s attachment theory which posits that continuous maternal attention is crucial to the healthy emotional and psychological development of children (Eyer and Ehrenreich and English cited in Wall 2010, p. 254).
- 9.
Based on the experiences in the United States, Sharon Hays (1996, p. 21) has discussed the ‘intensive motherhood’ ideology as a childrearing model that is carried out primarily by individual mothers and is ‘centred on children’s needs, with methods that are informed by experts, labor-intensive and costly’.
- 10.
For instance, natural parenting, a variant of attachment parenting requires parents to make ‘environmentally conscious parenting decisions’ such as buying organic food which is usually more expensive than non-organic food (Liss and Erchull 2012, p. 133).
- 11.
The rate of employment is higher (71.1%) when taking into account women living in rural areas (National Bureau of Statistics 2012, p. 42).
- 12.
Female labour participation on a mass level was encouraged after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 with ‘state-sponsored feminism’ as part of its Communist ideology (Zheng 2005).
- 13.
In the Western context, feminist writers have raised questions about whether women’s decision to take up attachment parenting is truly an autonomous maternal one or one influenced by ‘a patriarchal delusion and the over-valorisation of a motherhood ideal’ (Tietjens and Meyers cited in Liss and Erchull 2012, p. 132). As the traditional roles of Chinese women as homemakers and mothers purely performed in the domestic sphere were significantly undermined by the state-sponsored feminism that encouraged women to enter the labour force, the ‘valorisation’ of mothers as homemakers in the domestic sphere was not as prominent in China.
- 14.
It is important to note the ‘local variants’ of the global ideology of intensive motherhood (see Murray 2015). Unlike most middle class mothers in the West who ‘took on the responsibilities of childcare individually without choice but rather as a necessity’ (Ennis 2014, p. 2), mothers in urban China do not necessarily take on the mothering responsibilities all by themselves because of the presence of other female figures in childrearing such as grandmothers or nannies (see discussion in Chapter 3).
- 15.
Rumours tend to appear in crisis situations in which there is a lack of authoritative information. See further analysis of rumours concerning SARS (Tai and Sun 2011). Other rumours are created as the result of media sensationalism. For example, TV footage of a snack vendor stuffing steamed buns with flavoured cardboard later turned out to be a hoax (Xinhua News 2007).
- 16.
It was surprising to hear that many participants in my study personally knew someone’s child had been abducted.
- 17.
In Binah-Pollak’s (2014, p. 33) study about the role of grandparents in young children’s education in the context of ‘scientific and modern’ childrearing in China, the views and practices of grandparents’ are more dominant because the parents of the child are largely absent because of work and therefore grandparents’ values prevail in children’s upbringing (Binah-Pollak 2014). Binah-Pollak (2014, pp. 38–39) posits that the approach of Chinese grandparents in childrearing stands ‘in sharp contrast to the contemporary discourse about childhood and child-rearing, which emphasizes the importance of the child’s unique characteristics and emotion’, citing practices documented in her ethnographic research about grandparents ‘carrying children around, not allowing them to crawl outside, and preventing them from experiencing and experimenting as they wished’. While she acknowledges that grandparents’ worries about grandchildren’s safety and comfort are the reasons for the latter’s limited personal physical freedom (Binah-Pollak 2014, p. 38), her paper does not discuss the underlying factors of grandparental worries—such as social insecurity (for example, child abduction discussed in this chapter)—that compel carers to take precautionary measures.
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Gong, Q. (2016). Managing Anxiety: Parental Engagement with New Media and Civic Participation. In: Children’s Healthcare and Parental Media Engagement in Urban China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49877-9_6
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