Platformized family governance and the re-domestication of young people’s smartphone use in China

Abstract

Chinese families increasingly govern smartphone use that supports schoolwork, peer communication, entertainment, and engagement with algorithmically recommended content. This platform convergence makes it harder to determine what counts as legitimate use, who should manage it, and whose judgment should prevail. Drawing on a multi-phase qualitative corpus combining parent interviews, multi-informant interviews in selected households, linked revisits, nine caregiver-completed diaries, and parent focus groups in 25 Chinese households spanning rural, county-town, and urban settings with varied caregiving arrangements, this study investigates how families respond to such uncertainty. The analysis shows three related developments. Familiar rules became unstable when mixed-purpose smartphone use no longer fit existing categories. Families redistributed interpretive and management work, sometimes reopening questions of fairness, autonomy, and authority. We term these rule destabilization, distributed repair, and moral recalibration. These processes did not necessarily co-occur or unfold sequentially; their links depended on whether existing routines absorbed ambiguity and how knowledge, responsibility, and authority aligned. Young people sometimes supplied evidence, technical knowledge, or self-management practices that influenced family decisions, while final decision-making power often remained unequal. We conceptualize their interaction as dynamic family re-domestication, describing how families revise smartphone arrangements as platform conditions, caregiving responsibilities, and digital capacities change.