Learning to be free: smartwatches, mediated negotiation, and children’s everyday agency in Chinese urban families

This study examines how children’s media agency emerges through everyday practice rather than existing as a pre-given capacity. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork on children’s smartwatch use in City YT, this study investigates how child–parent relations are continuously negotiated and reconfigured across practices of mobility, sociability, and surveillance. The findings show that while smartwatches expand children’s spatial and social autonomy, they simultaneously embed them within ongoing infrastructures of technological monitoring, producing a mediated relational structure in which empowerment and constraint coexist. Rather than remaining static, this structure is gradually generated and stabilized through long-term processes of interaction, negotiation, and relational adjustment. Within this process, children’s agency is expressed not primarily through overt resistance, but through strategic engagement with rule boundaries and relational calibration. The study conceptualizes this process as safe agency: a low-visibility, non-confrontational form of agency through which children gradually expand their room for action by strategically adjusting rule boundaries without provoking open conflict. By revealing the relational mechanisms through which agency is generated under conditions of mediation and surveillance, this study advances a child-centered, practice-oriented perspective for rethinking the generative logic of children’s agency.