Mothering over digital media

If kinship is influenced by behaviour, digital media can also be viewed as impacting behaviour and playing an influential role in maintaining relationships. As is the case around the themes explored in Chapter 2, there is some historical precedence to what social media means in the Trinidadian context, drawing on previous experiences of transnational mothering. Before the ubiquity of social media, when mothers from the Caribbean migrated overseas for work, it was common to send home a barrel containing branded goods to their families, especially in Jamaica, as a way of showing care for their children from afar.¹⁴ The same mothers also phoned their children using calling cards, which became less costly with the rise of mobile phones. Horst’s study on the impact of the mobile phone on Jamaican transnational families underscores how increased and more regular communications created a sense of involvement, linking parents’ and children’s everyday lives.¹⁵ Similarly Olwig highlights the emotional ties maintained by transnational Caribbean families through different types of exchange, such as providing help among family members, face-to-face visits and electronic communication.¹⁶ Social media subsequently appears to extend these modes of exchange between transnational family members.

In the following stories of mothering, Facebook impacts upon the mother–child relationship in varying ways. In the first, family members live in different parts of Trinidad, while the second is an example of parenting over long distances. Vivian, who is introduced in the second story, is also a migrant to El Mirador from mainland China. The question that arises from these differing stories is therefore a more general one: can one truly ‘mother’ over Facebook or Skype?

Kym: mothering over Facebook

Kym grew up in Belmont, a suburb in Port of Spain. After university she worked in advertising, where she met her husband, who worked in sales. The couple married and moved to El Mirador, her husband’s hometown, where his family still live; here they had three sons and one daughter. Shortly after this daughter was born, several years after their sons, Kym and her husband divorced. When he returned to Port of Spain she was compelled to make a difficult choice. She decided to ‘split up the family’ and sent her two eldest sons, then completing their high school studies, to live with her husband. With their father’s income and two fewer children for Kym to support, the boys could attend a better school. Kym also explained a further reason:

If they lived here with me, in our neighbourhood, there are a lot of delinquents. Boys their age who don’t care about school and aren’t doing anything with their lives, just wasting time and getting up to mischief. I didn’t want my boys to grow up around that. I wanted them to grow up somewhere they know they’re better than that.

Both Kym’s sons have two phones: a smartphone and a basic phone for calling and texting their parents (her eldest son gave Kym his BlackBerry when he bought a Samsung Galaxy). They are all on Facebook and the two sons speak to their mother on average once every two days. Most often the boys initiate calling Kym. Sometimes they will share the same call if they are home together, or they will call her on their separate phones. A significant issue soon arose between Kym’s second son and his father, who asked him to accompany him to work and train to be a salesperson, instead of completing his final two years of school. The son began a trial period of working with his father on weekends and enjoyed the extra money he was earning. He and Kym had extended conversations about whether he should work full time or stay in school. Caught between a desire to give guidance to her son and a sense of guilt that she was not physically present to support him properly in the decision, Kym felt that she could advise him only so far. In their late evening phone calls, which could last up to an hour, she told her son it would be a better idea to stay in school; if he wanted to work afterwards, he would only have to wait two more years. The next day she went to work and logged onto Facebook (which she keeps open on her laptop throughout the day). She saw her son had updated his status to ‘so excited to be back in class next week’ and immediately ‘liked’ it, but waited until the next time they spoke to congratulate him, as she did not want to crowd him.

Facebook is one of the several modes of communication that have become important to Kym’s relationship to her sons while living away. She describes it as a means of seeing what is going on in their lives without having to ask them too many questions on the phone, which might give the impression that she is interrogating them. She has also set her profile to receive notifications from them, which enables her to hear from them throughout the day. As Kym does not see her sons often, she makes sure she can be contacted by phone, text or online as it is not an interruption to her work. She also feels that she can immediately respond or become available, even though she is not physically present.

Kym’s circumstances illustrate the consideration that is invested in mothering in absentia; it also reveals how over-mothering can potentially extend to platforms such as Facebook. Kym invests a great deal of thought into how to manage her distance and ‘virtual’ presence as a mother; she seeks to achieve a sense of balance between being able to mother her sons adequately and giving them sufficient choice and freedom in their relationship. In contrast to Kym’s story is that of Vivian, a mother living in El Mirador whose infant daughter lives in China with her parents-in-law.

Vivian: mothering over Skype

The themes of migration and diaspora among non-Trinidadians also emerged in the field work in El Mirador. Much has been written about the Caribbean diaspora, yet there remains very little about populations who have migrated to Trinidad – most notably the Chinese, as part of the recent trend of emigration in the post-Mao reformation era.¹⁷ ‘New’ Chinese migrants (xin yimin) numbered an estimated 5,000 in Trinidad in 2002.¹⁸ The figures include some arriving as chain migrants, already having family connections in Trinidad. These groups often begin working as employees in another family’s business, before establishing businesses of their own.

Vivian and her husband moved to El Mirador with Vivian’s uncle in 2010; their daughter Annie was born a few months later. Their move followed on from a trend in chain migration from Guangdong province to El Mirador that had developed over the previous decade. Vivian already had cousins and distant relatives in the southern city of San Fernando and the capital, Port of Spain. Each of these family units runs a Chinese restaurant, of which there are around eight in El Mirador alone; the newest one is run by Vivian’s uncle. The story of how he set up the restaurant is not unusual, reflecting well-documented movements of Chinese migration and families who build businesses off the back of loans (both cash and resources) from more established relatives in their host destinations.¹⁹

Like other xin yimin from Guangdong, Vivian’s family are relatively wealthy, the beneficiaries of a decade of economic growth in the province via foreign investment, emigration policies and expansion of trade industries. She holds a post-secondary diploma in business and English, and had a book-keeping job in her hometown before getting married. Once in Trinidad the family’s lives became very different, and Vivian decided to send her six-month-old daughter to live with her in-laws in China while she was still young. Vivian’s idea was that her daughter would live with her husband’s family until her Chinese passport was issued, when Vivian would return to collect her, around a year later.

Their restaurant is open around 11 or 12 hours per day and only closes on Sunday afternoons and evenings. Vivian is the main cashier and her uncle is the only chef. The laptop is always on and Vivian Skypes with her daughter every day. She also chats with her friends and video- calls her in-laws on the Chinese social media platform QQ on her iPhone. Vivian, her husband and her uncle live in a two-bedroom apartment above the restaurant. The rooms appear to be a temporary set-up compared with their homes in Taishan; the apartment has basic furnishing (two mattresses and a wardrobe), plus a simple kitchen and a small television. But they have also installed the latest and most powerful WiFi modem from Trinidad’s national telecommunications company, which only recently brought 4G broadband to El Mirador. They each have a laptop, and Vivian has an iPad and iPhone.

The extent to which the family could be described as ‘living’ in Trinidad is as questionable as the extent to which, for example, Filipino maids in Madianou and Miller’s study ‘lived’ in London. Through social media, the family could spend almost the entire time they were not working or sleeping together with friends and relatives from their countries of origin. Vivian and her family have few Trinidadian friends, although they are friendly enough with customers. Instead their social time is spent in their apartment, playing mah-jong with other relatives; after hours, her uncle only watches Chinese movies on his laptop and Skypes with his daughters and wife in Taishan. For the Zhang family in El Mirador, their non-work lives are largely ‘lived’ through digital media, communications and entertainment.

This research also provided the opportunity to visit Vivian in her hometown of Taishan in China, where she had been for a month, staying between her in-laws and parents. She had planned to return to Trinidad, taking her daughter Annie with her when she left three months later. The biggest shock to her on returning to Taishan was seeing how different Annie was after being raised by her grandmother, who largely stayed at home and was her sole playmate. Vivian’s style of parenting would have been more disciplinarian than that she witnessed from her mother-in-law, and she was immediately confronted by having to fulfil the multiple expectations of being a mother to Annie again. Although she and her daughter had interacted daily on Skype, the video calls exacerbated their missing one another. This in turn increased the tension when Vivian had to assume a more disciplinarian role in person, rather than simply the ‘nice’ mother she had been while away.

These two cases reflect the general dynamics established by combining polymedia and family relationships. Much like mobile and landline phones previously, social media has aided in bridging distances between parents and children who live apart in the same country or abroad.²⁰ Having multiple platforms for communication now also means that there is less emphasis on overcoming physical distance within relationships and more on the emotional or meaningful aspects of these relationships. For both the mothers discussed above, regular communication results in being more involved in their children’s lives and development. The visual affordance of Skype equates to more shared time to spend face to face, while Facebook facilitates a greater sense of a sustained co-presence or being able to check in.

The other common element in Kym and Vivian’s stories is that their communications with their children living with relatives elsewhere are structured largely around work commitments. How this work encroaches on family life through new media and how people navigate work and family life is an expanding field of research. In Trinidad, as well as elements of cultural specificity around family relationships, there are also cultural specificities in the connotations of work.²¹