ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how parents in the United States, China, and South Korea understood and employed parental control apps and/or features during the pandemic to manage children’s use of screen devices. During the pandemic, parents embraced the recent international proliferation of available app-based parental control tools and surveillance software. Many parents turned to these technological tools to better supervise their children’s daily screen activities, as they experienced a surge of increased screen time by their children, paired with growing parental anxiety over such changes. Despite this global trend, parental control landscapes vary across countries, as do cultures of parenting. This chapter critically examines parents’ interactions with parental control software in three countries with distinct political, economic, and sociocultural characteristics. This chapter proposes and demonstrates a central argument â€" how and why parents in the US, China, and South Korea utilised parental controls during the pandemic was shaped by the interactions between the various forms of contextualised sociotechnical imaginaries of parental controls, produced by different actors in the three countries. To this end, three actors are the specific focus of this chapter â€" the state, the market, and the families. These imaginaries, while not always in alignment with each other, collectively shaped parents’ lived experiences of parental controls in managing children’s everyday digital practices during the pandemic.
