Infrastructure-shaping parenting: WeChat, children, and family intimacy in separated families in China

Against the backdrop of large-scale migration in China, this study examines how WeChat shapes children’s everyday experiences of being parented and intimacy in separated families. As a pervasive digital infrastructure embedded in family life, WeChat does more than connect family members across distance; it reorganizes how care, visibility, responsibility, and affect are negotiated among working-elsewhere parents, liushou children, and co-present caregivers. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 family members from 15 families, we identify three dynamics of WeChat-mediated family life. First, WeChat remediates affect by transforming embodied care into logistical intimacy and monetized compensation shaped by parental guilt. Second, visual connectivity enables remote parental surveillance while also prompting children’s concealment, covert resistance, and intergenerational alliances. Third, it shifts parenting into semi-public digital spaces, where groups and Moments intensify performances of parental duty, family face, and educational anxiety. Based on these findings, we propose the concept of “infrastructure-shaping parenting” to emphasize both the inescapable dependency on WeChat across household members and its potential to push parenting practices into hyper-intensive forms, which reconfigures children’s agency while subtly distancing the affective intimacy it aims to maintain in separated families in China.