Cloud Parenting: Douyin Affordances, Emotional Authenticity, and Commodification of Wanghong Children

This article examines the phenomenon of cloud parenting in China, considering the affective mechanisms in sharenting and commodification of wanghong children facilitated by the platform affordances. We select five child wanghong accounts that are active on Douyin for case studies, along with corresponding audience interviews. We find that Douyin’s creation affordances enable child wanghong to create a family affection aesthetic. At the same time, audiences detect and decode emotional cues, especially children’s expressions and parent-child interactions, and use these signals to feel authenticity instead of rationally verifying it. Through this affective inference, audiences and child wanghong co-shape emotional authenticity. Cloud parenting emerges as a series of platformized affective practices normalized into data labor and consumption. We argue that in a platformized affective economy, guardians, cloud-parenting audiences, and the Douyin platform are complicit in producing and exacerbating the commodification of wanghong children. Douyin functions not merely as a content distribution platform but as an affective infrastructure that organizes, amplifies, and commodifies children’s emotions and family affection.