Reconfiguring Authority and Rebuilding Trust in Digital Parenting: Parents' Negotiation of Online Educational Expertise in China

ABSTRACT Digital technologies increasingly shape how parents access and use parenting knowledge, yet less is known about how such knowledge enters everyday family practices and affects parent–child relationships. This study examines how parent–child trust is negotiated and reconstructed in digitally mediated parenting. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with parents and children from five urban and rural families in Xiangyang, China, the study used thematic analysis and a relational perspective. Findings identify a four‐stage process: engagement with online expert knowledge, translation into parenting practice, emerging misalignment and tension and subsequent reflection and adjustment. Trust was not a stable outcome of information use but was continually negotiated through everyday interaction as external expert knowledge was incorporated into family life. Expert authority was likewise neither accepted nor rejected but reinterpreted through family relationships. The study highlights the relational consequences of the use of digital knowledge and the importance of supporting families in contextualising expert advice and sustaining trust.