Abstract
Curate. Manage. Mediate. Instill. And install the app. These are the parenting practices described in Sun Sun Lim’s Transcendent Parenting: Raising Children in the Digital Age, a book about the herculean efforts Asian parents make in order to raise their children in a society filled with increasingly rigid expectations about academic success, ever-changing technology, and heightened surveillance and reliance on experts to ensure that parents’ curating, managing, mediating, and instilling are following prescribed cultural practices.
Before delving into her current and past interview findings from people mostly in Singapore, but also in China, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other East, Southeast, and South Asian countries, Lim notes how childhood has come to be an arena for increased scholarly work, with a focus on childhood vulnerability and concomitant parental insecurity that necessitates tireless effort and reliance on experts to assess risk. She reviews the (mostly western) conceptual frames that have dominated family and parenting research for the last couple of decades and that she says have “gained traction” in Asian countries. She references the heavy hitters: intensive mothering (Hays 1996), concerted cultivation (Lareau 2003), parenting out of control (Nelson 2012), paranoid parenting (Furedi 2002), and of course helicopter parenting. After defining others’ concepts, Lim introduces her own: transcendent parenting (TP), which is not a form of parenting in and of itself, but rather a set of practices emerging from a tech-saturated environment. TP goes beyond the home, beyond any physical space, and beyond what may be reasonable expectations for parents to be able to handle.
Lim describes common characteristics found in global urban middle-class parenting, especially in Asia: an education arms race where children’s success increasingly depends on heavy scheduling and reliance on metrics and enrichment classes, enhanced parental involvement to ensure children’s success, and an overwhelming amount of technological prowess required to manage it all. Lim also describes contextual factors that matter in Asia in particular: familial and cultural focus on parent-child interdependence, duty, academic success, and reliance on parental authority.
The book’s findings are organized by location: at home, at school, out and about, and at play. As a result, it reads as a sort of geography of transcendent parenting, all while uncovering patterns threaded across location. Namely, the omnipresence of the technological part of parenting in Asia renders the boundaries between these locations blurry.
Readers begin their geographic journey in the physical home in Chapter Three. Lim describes a part of a family’s physical home that they have carved out to serve as their child’s learning center and then describes how the digital school is ever present and pushes into home life. Parents participate in a permanent night shift of duties associated with children’s academic success. What’s particularly challenging, Lim notes, is that parents are in a paradoxical position of trying to protect their children from overexposure to (inappropriate) technology at the same time that they have to master and monitor their children’s required use of (necessary) school-based technology.
Lim’s findings about school (Chapter 4) extend much of what was introduced in Chapter Three, reiterating that the experience of school is not geographically limited to the school building itself. Rather, school is omnipresent via home-school conferencing apps such as ClassDojo or Edmodo. Every day parents receive information via multiple apps about homework and pressure to hover over their children from teachers before the children are even home from school. Parents also rely on each other for updated and accurate information via digital group chats on platforms such as WhatsApp. It is no wonder that Lim describes parents as virtually and vicariously keeping their children company throughout the day.
In Chapter Five (“Out and About”), Lim adds her previous interview findings from China and Korea, as well as from Indonesian and Vietnamese students in Singapore, to inform her focus on the use of technology by parents to keep an eye on their children—a set of practices that Lim subsumes under a “parental surveillance assemblage.” Whether using nanny cams, location trackers, or social media monitoring tools, parents in Lim’s studies are in a state of perpetual contact with, and perpetual concern over, their children. Many of these actions are about parents’ fear of risk, which Lim critically attributes to tech companies deliberately exploiting consumers in order to stimulate demand for surveillance apps. Lim’s analytic attention to status is showcased, albeit subtly, in her discussion of how parents install in-home cameras (to ensure caretakers’ effectiveness) but do not want closed-circuit TVs in day cares (to ensure teachers are not hampered in their ability to teach). Parents perceive teachers to be skilled and trusted gatekeepers to their children’s success. Thus, class and occupational prestige distinctions are exemplified by the explicit attention to privacy for skilled teachers but not for unskilled home childcare providers. This chapter reveals different ways that surveillance practices demonstrate parents’ location in an ongoing and energy-sapping panoptic state. Parents are assured of their children’s safety in a risky world yet burdened by the practice of gaining that assurance.
Part of the parental surveillance assemblage is monitoring children’s interaction with other children, the focus of Chapter Six (“At Play”). As parents navigate surveillance and communication apps, children are also trying to figure out how to act in constantly changing digital platforms. While earlier chapters described parents’ digital hovering in order to ensure academic success, this chapter is more about children’s peer relations, social development, mental health, and safety. Lim offers a critical voice of the hovering practices of parents in their children’s social lives, noting (perhaps too briefly) that children can be denied the capacity to mature and gain independent problem-solving skills, that peer relations are not necessarily made better when parents intervene or take sides, and that children’s privacy may be compromised.
Lim ends her book by sharing a story about her own experience as a mother in Singapore, tying together the book’s main findings and adding a personal connection (which she also does earlier in the book by sharing screen shots of some digital parent-to-parent conversations). She discusses Asian fathers’ involvement and surveillance laws. She ends with an invitation to continue assessing how well things are going for the parents in the places she studies and beyond.
Transcendent Parenting helpfully describes a new set of parenting practices that must be situated in contemporary technology use patterns. Lim is concerned, to be sure, but that concern does not include lengthy critique or decisive recommendations for action. The book does not need to do everything, but Lim could tap further into how her findings may offer sophisticated answers to questions or recommendations for how and why social scientists, policy-makers, and parents ought to deal with those concerns. If the book is meant to uncover what parent-child interactions look like, it is successful. But readers may be thirsty for Lim to more thoroughly wrestle with the “so what” or “now what” questions when it comes to individual and interactional outcomes for parents and children. The same could be said for more commentary on structural issues relating to social class inequality (I wondered how the in-home caretakers manage their own children’s academic success, for example), the technological marketplace, surveillance, and children’s agency. Readers are left to ponder these as possibilities for Lim’s continued research, rather than finding all the explanations, connections, or next steps in the book itself.
Lim attaches the term “universal” to her findings, which she says are applicable across boundaries such as nation and social class. Is it a problem to push aside geographic, cultural, and class variation among the Asian countries represented in (and beyond) her sample? On one hand, there are big changes to parenting processes that stem from technology weaving itself into cultural patterns that transcend not just physical spaces associated with institutional realms, but geographic and social group spaces as well. On the other hand, especially for western readers, the risk is less understanding of important variations between Asian countries and between groups within those countries. It may even exacerbate stereotypes. But such is the difficult task of the social researcher: we use the categories that we may wish to deconstruct, and we make claims based on soundly researched stories told by those few whose experiences may represent the experiences of many in order to alert readers that social change is occurring. I appreciated the bold claims about big patterns, but I wanted more acknowledgment in this book of variations within and across places and groups, especially since Lim has a vast body of research that could speak to this.
Transcendent Parenting is clear and honest and has a compactness about it that gives the reader easy ways to remember the key findings while not sacrificing depth. This makes it a helpful classroom book for students in introductory courses on families, sociology, or technology and society (there is also a brief and sufficient methodological appendix).
Lim gives us is something we did not have before: an updated and contextualized demonstration of the omnipresent impact of technology in everyday family life. The book alerts the reader to vivid ways that parents in Asia are required to transcend physical space into a world they can’t keep up with, at all times with no pause, all in order to raise their children to be deemed successful in the cultural contexts that are shaping those parenting practices and pressures. Just because her descriptions are located in Asian urban middle-class family life and in institutional realms where parents and children reside does not mean the processes and practices and pressures are not present in other places and social institutions. The technology is here, and it is defined as necessary for success.
Transcendent Parenting describes what it takes to be a good parent today. Lim’s vivid findings reveal that, indeed, there’s an app for that.