The Feminisation of Responsibility
As sociologist Shirley Hill reminds us, families are, at their core, institutions of care. Parenting has long been seen as a moral duty and a private responsibility. Today, under the pressures of neoliberalism and rapid technological change, it has also become deeply individualised. Parents are increasingly expected to manage risks on their own, from economic insecurity to digital harm, even when those risks are social and structural in origin. Within this framework, care is reframed as a personal obligation, and parenting becomes a moral project of risk management. More often than not, it is mothers who carry this responsibility.
Research consistently shows that mothers remain the primary coordinators of children’s safety, education, and now digital well-being. As American sociologist Arlie Hochschild noted, emotional labour, the invisible work of managing feelings and relationships, has long been feminised. In digital family life, this labour expands to include managing not only emotions, but also data, risk, and responsibility.
This moral economy of motherhood is deeply entwined with what sociologist Frank Furedi calls “paranoid parenting”: a culture in which the ideal of the “good parent” demands constant vigilance, anxiety, and self-surveillance. Historically, the “good mother” has been the standard against which all parental competence is measured. In this context of paranoid parenting, she is expected to be constantly aware, informed, and in control. She is placed within a system that produces a plethora of digital risks, from non-transparent algorithms and data-driven recommendation systems to harmful advertising and exposure to violent, pornographic and hateful content.
The Uneven “Democracy” of Family Life
At first glance, contemporary families appear more democratic than ever. Parents negotiate screen time rather than imposing rules, children are encouraged to express their views, and decision-making is framed as collaborative rather than one-dimensional. Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross describe this as the rise of the democratic family: a model in which power circulates through ongoing dialogue rather than a one-way dimension of authority. They show how digital technologies play a key role in this shift, where platforms become places through which parents express, contest and negotiate their views with their children. This trend also reflects a broader decline in authoritarian parenting styles and a growing preference for negotiation over prohibition.
But, even within this seemingly egalitarian framework, the labour of care tends to be gendered, with mothers most frequently facilitating these negotiations and mediating conflicts. In other words, the democratic family depends on a maternal infrastructure of care (one that remains largely invisible), where equality in decision-making depends on unequal distributions of time, energy, and emotional responsibility.
Datafication and the ‘Care’ of Surveillance
Digital technologies intensify these inequalities. From baby-tracking apps and smart toys to school portals and location trackers, everyday family routines are now digitally mediated. Sociologist Deborah Lupton describes this phenomenon as “caring dataveillance”, or the process through which care practices are translated into digital traces in an attempt to gain a sense of control over their lives and lessen some of the burden of caring labour.
For parents, these technologies promise control and reassurance. Yet they also extend surveillance deeper into the home, creating new expectations that good parenting must be data-informed, measurable, and optimised. The broader conversation about parenting and technology is still shaped by powerful cultural ideologies, especially around maternal responsibility, technological optimism, and access. It is often mothers, particularly those who have access to digital and economic resources, who are positioned as both the users and the subjects of these technologies. In this way, digital tools do not just support care; they also reproduce inequalities and moral pressures around what it means to be a “good mother”.
Algorithms as Co-Parents
Perhaps most concerningly, algorithms have become silent co-parents, shaping what children see, learn, and desire. Recommendation systems on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram decide which content appears next, subtly steering children’s interests and beliefs.
As media scholar Taina Bucher argues, algorithmic systems both continue and transform older regimes of surveillance. They don’t just observe; they act. They make decisions, predictions, and recommendations that structure everyday life. For parents, this introduces a new form of relational complexity: they are expected to mediate not only between themselves and their children, but also between their families and invisible algorithmic systems. These non-transparent systems often undermine parental authority while assigning mothers ultimate responsibility for managing the consequences.
Emotional Labour in the Algorithmic Age
Digital parenting pushes the emotional labour of parents into a data-driven domain. They are expected to manage technological risks that are complex, ever-changing, and often invisible. Parents must learn to understand algorithms, make sense of data, and maintain the feeling of being a “good parent” in a world that equates good parenting with constant vigilance.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that many parents feel a growing sense of uncertainty or loss of control, where algorithmic systems reshape how power and responsibility are experienced at home. This tension is especially visible in the media narrative of “keeping children safe online”. Parents are expected to manage digital risks, yet the very platforms they rely on operate through unclear and constantly shifting algorithms. Parents often construct their own “algorithmic imaginary”, which is a personal interpretation of how platforms work that rarely matches reality. This mismatch can leave parents feeling inadequate or mistrustful, as fleeting moments of control are quickly undermined by the systems they’re trying to manage. Parental agency, then, is not something fixed or stable; it is relational, fragile, and deeply entangled with technocapitalism that structures everyday family life.
Rethinking Care Beyond Control
Parents, especially mothers, continue to find meaning and agency within systems that constrain them. But the emotional labour they carry should not be normalised as a private matter.
If datafied societies have made parenting feel like a full-time surveillance job, then the solution cannot be to demand even more vigilance. Instead, responsibility for (digital) safety must be shared across families, institutions, and the technology companies that design our everyday tools and profit from the data we produce. Transparency, regulation, and education are as important as a cultural shift that recognises care as collective rather than individual.
To move from control back to care, we must make visible the invisible labour that sustains digital family life and ask who benefits from it. As long as data infrastructures depend on mothers’ unpaid emotional and organisational labour, the idea of the democratic family will remain just that: an idea.
Deniz Celikoglu
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