What happens after young adults’ “friending” of parents? A qualitative study about mediated family communication and privacy management in China

Abstract

The existing literature on “friending” parents on mobile social media has focused on the momentary decision of accepting the “friending” requests. In addition, a major body of research on privacy management online focuses on predicting privacy protection behaviors based on samples primarily from the United States. This in-depth qualitative study employs focus groups to explore how Chinese young people interact with their parents after accepting them as friends on WeChat, a popular mobile social application in China. Many participants reported privacy turbulence due to parental interference with young adults’ expression of their own values and behaviors on WeChat, which reflects the deep conflict between the collectivistic culture (the parental generation) and the individualistic culture (young adults) in contemporary Chinese society. This study also finds that a family’s offline communication is generally parallel to its online communication on mobile social media after young people’s friending of parents.

Keywords

communication privacy management (CPM)family communication patterns (FCPs)individualistic/collectivistic culture mobile social media privacy management privacy turbulence

Mobile social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have linked massive numbers of users in online social networks. Mobile social media refer to applications and services for smartphones which facilitate the exchange of information, news, and content among users (Humphreys, 2013). A user’s friends, colleagues, family members, and relatives coexist online after becoming “friends” with the user on Facebook, for example. Usually, these people all have access to the user’s posts and can talk to each other. In this way, mobile social media bring new challenges for family relationships in the 21st century (Storch & Ortiz Juarez-Paz, 2019). Before the social media era, different groups of people in one’s personal network could hardly get to know each other unless being introduced on special occasions such as weddings or birthday parties. Nowadays, a family issue will be disseminated to a much wider circle of people outside the family, friends on the mobile social media, within just a few seconds. Parents may discover unfamiliar facets of their children from their children’s posts or interactions with friends on social media. In other words, social media mingle one’s all acquaintances at the same place. It is like friends from all walks of life on social media have been invited to stay at the party at one’s home 24/7. Mobile social media have changed family privacy boundaries.

The existing literature on young people’s “friending” their parents on social media primarily uses cross-sectional surveys to find or verify variables predicting the acceptance of parents’ “friending” requests (e.g., Ball, Wanzer, & Servoss, 2013; Child, Duck, Andrews, Butauski, & Petronio, 2015; Child & Westermann, 2013). Research suggests that theoretical constructs from communication privacy management (CPM) theory (e.g., Petronio, 2010, 2013; Petronio & Altman, 2002) and family communication patterns (FCPs) theory (e.g., Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 2002) will predict young people’s willingness to accept parents on social media. Yet, the question of what happens to family relationships after one’s parents have been “friended” on mobile social media still needs to be explored.

Meta-analytical reviews find that there is a lack of qualitative research to delve into the nuances of how and why people adopt privacy protective strategies at individual, familial, and cultural levels (e.g., Baruh, Secinti, & Cemalcilar, 2017; Bélanger & Crossler, 2011). In addition, given that samples from the United States, an individualistic society, have made the primary contribution to the online privacy management literature, more research on diverse populations, particularly from collectivistic cultures, is necessary (Bélanger & Crossler, 2011).

Echoing these research calls, this study uses 18 focus groups to explore why and how Chinese college students communicate with their parents on WeChat, currently China’s most popular mobile social media application. This study’s findings imply that the growing individualistic culture of young people is resisting the parental collectivistic culture. This article contributes to the family communication and communication privacy management literatures through bringing a more nuanced and complex understanding of how mobile social media impact family privacy management and relationships.

Social media and privacy management

Social media enable users to share pictures, texts, and news stories with people who have been permitted to be friends with the user (Joinson, 2008). Social media users utilize the “friending” permission in their account settings to establish virtual walls to make their posts invisible to nonfriends on social media (Nef, Ganea, Müri, & Mosimann, 2013). In this way, users set up boundaries within which they disclose information about their personal perceptions and behaviors. Research shows that people have various motivations for disclosing personal information on social media, including enjoyment from feedback (Cheung, She, & Jie, 2015; Kim, Sohn, & Choi, 2011), exhibition of one’s identity (Hogan, 2010), pursuit of popularity and attention (G. M. Chen, 2015; Christofides, Muise, & Desmarais, 2009), attracting new friends (Cheung et al., 2015), strengthening existing relationships (Bazarova & Choi, 2014), and maintaining community memberships (R. Chen & Sharma, 2017).

While social media contribute to people’s relationship building and maintenance, people’s concerns about their privacy on social media are also well documented (Baruh et al., 2017; Trottier, 2012). Privacy on social media is defined as informational privacy, which is conceptualized as individuals’ ownership of the circulation of the information about them (Nissenbaum, 2009). Baruh et al.’s (2017) meta-analytical review found that people with more privacy concerns were less willing to share personal information and more likely to adopt protective privacy management strategies on social media.

Communication privacy management theory (CPM) helps us understand individuals’ management of their informational privacy (Petronio, 2010, 2013; Petronio & Altman, 2002). CPM posits that when people communicate about private information with their acquaintances, they establish a shared ownership boundary of such information with these authorized others. Privacy turbulence happens when one of the co-owners unintentionally or purposefully disclose the information to a third party without permission (Child, Haridakis, & Petronio, 2012). The unauthorized disclosing behavior breaks the expected boundary of the information privacy, which often leads to interpersonal conflicts. CPM argues that people’s decision-making about disclosing to or hiding private information from others is influenced by culture, motivation, context, and benefit–risk calculation (Petronio, 2010). Yet, how these factors interplay with each other still calls for further research.

“Friending” parents on social media and family communication patterns

People’s decision-making regarding “friending” others on social media has been a heated topic in social media studies (e.g., Ball et al., 2013; Lewis & West, 2009). Friending research is associated with privacy management because individuals authorize others to have access to their posts after becoming “friends” with each other on social media. In this way, individuals expand the ownership boundary of their private information to include their social media friends, and these friends become co-owners of their personal information.

“Friending” parents on social media has received much research attention because mobile devices in the 21st century have deeply influenced family communication and relationships (Storch & Ortiz Juarez-Paz, 2019). Mobile devices connect families across distance (Cabalquinto, 2018; Tazanu, 2015; Yu, Huang, & Liu, 2017) and help obtaining reassurance of family members’ safety (Storch & Ortiz Juarez-Paz, 2019). On the other hand, mobile devices distract family members’ attention (Lee, 2009; Williams & Merten, 2014) and cause misunderstandings and conflicts (Hawk, Keijsers, Hale, & Meeus, 2009; West, Lewis, & Currie, 2009).

A survey found that young people in the United States were willing to accept parents as friends on Facebook (Child & Westermann, 2013), whereas other studies reported young adults’ hesitation to be “friends” with parents on Facebook (e.g., Ball et al., 2013; West et al., 2009). Some participants explained that they were afraid to receive possible criticism from parents, and some experienced anxiety about disclosing family relationships to friends (West et al., 2009). Young people may feel susceptible to parental pressure when encountering such requests from parents and feel obliged to accept their parents as “friends” on social media albeit with some reluctance (Child & Westermann, 2013). To take a further look at who accepts and who rejects “friending” requests from parents, research finds that the theory of family communication patterns is a powerful tool to identify who accepts and who rejects “friending” requests from parents.

Family communication patterns (FCPs) theory is the most influential theory in the field of family communication (Hesse, Rauscher, Goodman, & Couvrette, 2017). This theory uses two dimensions—conversation orientation and conformity orientation—to distinguish four different communication patterns in the family context (Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 1997, 2002; Koerner & Schrodt, 2014). Koerner and Fitzpatrick (2006) state that conversation orientation measures to what degree a family can openly and frequently discuss any topic. A family receiving high scores on conversation orientation usually has more quality time, discusses diverse topics openly, and makes decisions collectively (Schrodt, Witt, & Messersmith, 2008). Conformity orientation measures the extent to which a family requires all its members to hold the same values and perceptions. High conformity orientation suggests a family places cohesive family values and interests over individual ones, and parents usually have hierarchical power structure over children (Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 2002). Ball et al.’s (2013) survey found that young people from families with higher conversation orientation demonstrated more willingness to accept parents as friends on Facebook. In other words, when their families have open communication offline, young people also tend to participate in communicating with their parents online. Child et al. (2015) had similar findings—families which were open and tolerant of privacy tended to have open communication offline at home about family members’ posts on social media.

Accepting parents as friends on Facebook just needs one click, but parent–child interactions after “friending” are complicated. On the one hand, Kanter, Afifi, and Robbins’s (2012) experiment reported that family relationships improved within the first 2 months after friending parents among college students who had experienced conflicts with their parents. Lam (2013) reported how mobile social media assisted in keeping “family solidarity” when family members resided in various locations.

On the other hand, Burke, Adamic, and Marciniak (2013) analyzed 400,000 posts and comments between American parents and their children on Facebook. They found three most common themes: parents giving advice to children, expressing affection, and reminding children to call. While expression of love usually contributes to improvement of family relationships, receiving parental advice and call reminders may not be pleasant for young people. Based on this line of reasoning, adding parents to social media may cause problems for young people. In Padilla-Walker, Coyne, and Fraser’s (2012) study, adolescents reported privacy invasion after acceptance of parents as friends online.

Parental privacy invasion is enacted in various ways. Parents’ concerns about their children’s privacy disclosures on social media trigger their teenage children’s own privacy concerns, which further lead to the children using defensive privacy strategies (Feng & Xie, 2014). Some parents announce clear rules to their children about where and when to use social media (Shin, 2015). Some parents “snoop” on their adolescents by reading their online posts (Doty & Dworkin, 2014).

In order to cope with this privacy invasion, young people from families with lower conversation orientation and higher conformity orientation were most likely to use stricter privacy settings after having parents on Facebook (Ball et al., 2013). Some adolescents set their profiles to private or partially private, delete previous posts, or segment the audience for specific posts (Marwick & Boyd, 2014). Online privacy management behaviors also include cleaning cookies (Lutz & Strathoff, 2014), controlling one’s self-disclosure (Spiekermann, Krasnova, Koroleva, & Hildebrand, 2010), and blocking undesirable people (French & Read, 2013).

It is worth noting that although digital devices provide more communication opportunities, the frequency of online communication among family members was found to be irrelevant to the quality of family relationships (Lee, 2009). Therefore, research should further explore how social media impact family relationships after family members become friends on social media.

Mobile social media, family relationships, and privacy in China

WeChat is the most popular mobile social media application in China with more than 1 billion active monthly users (Lien & Cao, 2014). Given that China has a population of 1.4 billion people, WeChat has linked 70% of Chinese people. WeChat incorporates functions of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and MHealth. Similar to WhatsApp, WeChat enables users to send messages and make video calls. The most popular social feature of WeChat is Moment (Pengyou Quan), with which users can upload their pictures and texts, and share news stories and others’ comments. Pengyou Quan is similar to a combination of Facebook and Twitter.

With massive numbers of Chinese users, WeChat has inevitably become the major mobile social medium for young adults and their parents (Yu et al., 2017). Yu et al. (2017) reported WeChat facilitated safety reassurance, sharing of experiences, and obtaining family support. Particularly, they reported that the collectivist Chinese culture has impacted how participants make meaning of this mobile social media. For example, some participants reported perceiving WeChat as a tool for families to build consensus. Similarly, Lam (2013) also found mobile social media to be a tool for Chinese people to build family solidarity. These findings suggest a strong conformity orientation of Chinese family relationships. However, such findings contradict the results of Zhang (2007) and Huang (2010), both of which reported that conformity orientation was found to be insignificant among Chinese families. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there is a considerable time gap between Zhang (2007) and Yu et al. (2017), and the mobile social media application WeChat was released into the market only since 2011. More recent research is necessary to advance the scholarship.

Whether one’s privacy boundary includes family members or just him/herself reflects collectivist or individualistic culture orientation. Individuals’ decisions on privacy boundaries to include or exclude their parents mirror the perceived size of the zone of social responsibility and dependence. Hofstede (1984) perceives an individualistic culture as one in which individuals have social responsibility only for themselves, whereas in a collectivistic culture, people’s responsibility and dependence extend to wider groups such as families. CPM theory points out that culture is one of the major influences of privacy management (Petronio, 2010). Ur and Wang (2013) argue that a fundamental difference exists between individualistic and collectivist cultures in privacy management. For example, Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, and Lucca (1988) found that in collectivistic cultures parents tended to allow smaller privacy boundaries for children, compared with individualistic cultures.

In sum, in this traditional collectivist society where family usually constitutes the basic unit of society, WeChat has brought new affordances as well as challenges to family relationships and privacy management in China.

We develop our research questions based on family communication patterns (FCPs) theory and communication privacy management (CPM) theory. FCPs theory posits two dimensions for family communication: conversation orientation (open communication about any topic) and conformity orientation (conformity to parents’ values and expectations). The set of Research Question One (RQ1) was developed from the conversation orientation, and RQ2 is based on the conformity orientation. CPM theory discusses privacy turbulence and management strategies, which is reflected in RQ3.

RQ1a: What are the topics that young people and their parents tend to share with each other on mobile social media?

RQ1b: What are the topics that young people do not tend to share with their parents on mobile social media?

RQ1c: How, if at all, does “friending” parents change topics in family communication on mobile social media?

RQ2: How do young people perceive the conformity expectations of their parents during the interactions with them on mobile social media?

RQ3a: What privacy turbulence between young people and their parents has happened due to social media usage?

RQ3b: What privacy management strategies do young people use accordingly?

Methods

To answer the research questions, this study adopted focus groups as the research methodology. Focus groups allow us to manage a relatively large and representative sample of participants and stimulate dynamic discussions about the research topic (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Due to their prevalence and extremely low cost, mobile social media have now become the major communication method for connecting with parents among Chinese university students. The study procedure was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University.

A total of 18 focus groups at a southeastern university in China were conducted on campus, with seven to 10 undergraduate students recruited in each group. A total of 146 students ranging from 18 to 24 years old participated in this study. They came from five different schools at the university, including the schools of literature, history, philosophy, science, and engineering. So many majors were chosen because we wanted to obtain data from participants who were as demographically diverse as possible. The second researcher used semistructured protocol questions to moderate all the focus groups. Each session lasted approximately 60 minutes. Data were collected from March 8 to May 10, 2017.

We conducted two focus groups each week. In the first 2 weeks, we assumed that gender-heterogeneous groups would stimulate heated discussions. However, we failed to find a vibrant discussion among a mix of both female and male undergraduates in the first two focus groups. They seemed to hesitate to answer the protocol questions and give follow up comments to each other. We went back to the privacy management literature and found gender differences in privacy concerns reported by meta-analytical reviews (e.g., Baruh et al., 2017). Therefore, in the following weeks, we assigned students into gender-homogeneous groups, and the discussions were much more active. In total, we had two groups of mixed genders, 10 groups of only females, and six groups of only males.

As the focus was intergenerational communication between parents and children after “friending,” the recruitment criterion was undergraduate students who had added their parents as “friends” on WeChat. The participants were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling. The second researcher first conducted a pilot study with her research assistants to finalize the protocol questions. She then invited these assistants to pass on the research recruitment invitations to their acquaintances. Once the first focus group completed their participation, they introduced other students. During the focus group sessions, the research assistants took notes, and the discussions were audio-recorded. All participants were registered university undergraduates who used smartphones in their daily lives. As WeChat is the most widely used mobile social media platform in China, protocol questions were developed around usage of the social section—Pengyou Quan—of WeChat. All the sessions were conducted in Mandarin Chinese.

During the focus group sessions, the moderator used a list of open-ended protocol questions. She also respected the dynamics of the different focus groups and gave sufficient time for the participants to discuss their own opinions. Based on the research questions, the protocol questions were divided into three parts: First, the participants were asked to reflect on their posts and their parents’ posts on Pengyou Quan. Participants were also invited to talk about their parents’ usage of mobile social media. Then the moderator asked the participants to reflect on their perceptions of and feelings about interacting with their parents on WeChat. Finally, the participants were invited to share their corresponding strategies for privacy regarding parents as “friends” on WeChat.

The research assistants transcribed the audio data in Chinese. In the data analysis stage, inductive theme analysis was conducted based on previous research findings (Roulston, 2010). In the first round, both researchers open-coded the emerging themes in the data. Then, the researchers compared the codes with each other and discussed the major codes and themes in the data to make the codes consistent. At this stage, the researchers paid attention to themes related to privacy ownership, privacy control, and privacy turbulence, as suggested by Petronio (2013). They also noted any instances of conversation and conformity orientations (Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 2002) of family communication in the transcripts. Meanwhile, the researchers remained open-minded about other emerging themes in the data and discussed their meanings based on the research questions. After the two researchers reached consensus regarding the codes and themes, they recoded the data and then compared the similarities and differences in the codes across the data. In this round, codes and themes most relevant to the research questions were chosen for in-depth analysis. All excerpts and quotations that were selected to cite in the findings were translated into English by the first researcher and then checked by the second researcher.

Results

This section presents the results of this study as they relate to each of the research questions. To protect the participants’ identities, we refer to them using numbers instead of their names.

RQ1: Topics shared or avoided on WeChat

This set of research questions aims to explore what topics are shared (RQ1a) or avoided (RQ1b) on mobile social media after young people and their parents become friends on WeChat. In addition, RQ1c compares how, if at all, topics in family communication change after young people add parents to their social media.

RQ1a: Topics shared between young people and parents

Young people’s exhibition of positive images for parents

Sharing behavior on mobile social media is not only about directly forwarding contents on a one-to-one basis. When young people post about their activities and thoughts, they share their personal information with the whole community of “friends” on mobile social media. Their parents can read these posts about them, too. In this way, they share personal things with their parents on mobile social media.

In general, participants explained that they tended to post original content created by themselves on mobile social media. Young people used various metaphors to emphasize their autonomy and self-presentation in publishing posts on WeChat’s Pengyou Quan section. Participant 9.2 described Pengyou Quan as “one’s own backyard garden” where people can cultivate their own plants for display. Participant 11.7 said, “WeChat exposes a lot of personal information [about young people].” Participant 2.7 added, “WeChat is meant for sharing details about one’s daily life.” They use mobile social media to strategically construct their images in the online community.

More interestingly, participants explained that they posted specific topics in the hope that their parents, particularly, could read these posts. For example, they deliberately posted about obtaining academic achievements, studying late at the library, and exercising to build a positive image for parents. Participant 6.5 said, “I only post good things in my life, and never post sad things. I do not want my parents to worry about me.” Participant 7.5 said, “All my posts on WeChat are extremely positive because the elder generations are there.” Some participants purposefully reminded their parents to check their WeChat as soon as they released their self-enhancement posts.

Parents’ “chicken soup” for young people

In contrast, participants stated that their parents used Pengyou Quan primarily to forward existing contents and to monitor the lives of their friends and children. The participants recalled that the posts their parents most frequently forwarded to their college-age children were on the topics of health, populist comments, scandals, politics, and Xinling Jitang (literally translates as “chicken soup for the mind,” a colloquial Chinese term that refers to strategies and tools for success). However, many young people expressed little interest in these topics. The following statement emerged repeatedly in the data, “The ‘chicken soup for the mind’ is cheap!” They described an aversion to pursuing mainstream success of money and fame as their parents expected, which reflected the participants’ strong resistance to their parents’ forwarded “chicken soup for the mind.”

In contrast, many young people claimed that they actually belonged to Sang Wenhua (literally translates to “funeral culture”). “Funeral culture” refers to a callous attitude of “whatever” among young people who are not hesitant to voice their frustration with life, study, or work. Many students explained that their parents always liked to see their children in a good mood and having positive experiences, but this was not possible as their lives could not always be rosy. Participant 14.3 said that some of his posts about negative moods were merely situational and temporary, but his parents took them very seriously. Even when he explained this to his parents, they still could not empathize with him. Participant 5.5 said that mobile social media helped exhibit one’s authentic side, but parents were not prepared to accept the imperfect and gloomy aspects of their adult children.

RQ1b: Topics avoided between young people and parents

Taboo topics for parents

Family conflicts happened when young people posted about their bad moods, relationship troubles, classes they skipped, and late-night parties. Participant 13.3 said, “It was horrible when I had not blocked my parents on WeChat’s Pengyou Quan. For example, last week I posted something about feeling stressed. When my mother saw it, she immediately called to ask what was going on.” After that, to avoid further questioning, the participant started to make such posts invisible to her parents.

Some parents were unhappy to see their children stay up late or hang out with friends. Participant 10.6 found that every time he posted something after midnight, he would get reprimanded by his parents the next day. Therefore, he learned to block his parents from his late-night posts. Participant 12.8 also blocked her parents from viewing posts about time she spent with her friends, because her parents expected her only to study hard at university rather than hanging out with friends. Conversely, if she ever posted about studying hard at the library, she would intentionally remind her parents to check her profile.

RQ1c: Topics before and after “friending.”

No change of topics in family communication

A salient theme in the data is that WeChat does not necessarily facilitate new topics for discussion between parents and young people. Some participants thought that mobile social media had not changed their existing family communication patterns: Good is still good; bad is still bad. Participant 11.9 said, “I feel that my parents and I still live in two different worlds after they started using WeChat. We don’t have much influence on each other.” Participant 9.8 said, “My parents and I are only connected through kinship. The distance in our relationship has not been reduced through WeChat.”

It seems that the posting and forwarding of contents by young adults and their parents may not actually contribute to family closeness. Many participants said they seldom clicked on their parents’ posts even when their parents forwarded them. Participant 7.6’s response represented a typical strategy: “When my parents forward me posts for educational purposes, I just ignore them.”

More understanding of parents as individuals

In contrast, a few participants reported that they saw a different side of their parents’ personalities through their Pengyou Quan, which gave the participants new topics to talk about with their parents. Participant 12.5, for instance, said, “My parents are doctors. I seldom go to the hospital, so I knew very little about their professional lives. Now I get to know more through their Pengyou Quan, so we have new topics to discuss.” Participant 2.3 also reported that he discovered his parents’ hobbies through WeChat. According to Participant 6.3, before her parents got WeChat accounts, she thought of her mother as an optimistic person. However, after reading her emotional reposts on Pengyou Quan over several months, she realized that her mother had fragile moments. Through Pengyou Quan, the participant felt that she now better understood her mother, which, in her opinion, contributed to making their relationship closer. Notably, these small number of participants also claimed that they usually had smooth and transparent communication with family members when they met parents in person. For them, Wechat just opened one more window to get to know their parents. This means that the family communication among families with high conversation orientation offline still reflected such orientation on mobile social media.

RQ2: Conformity orientation after “friending” parents

This research question investigates whether family members are asked to conform to their families’ values and expectations.

Strong expectations of conformity from parents

Participants reported that their parents expected them to conform to the families’ values on mobile social media. For instance, Participant 7.5 complained that his father reposted an article about economics and asked him to provide a written review of it. The participant explained that his father wanted to see if he had really understood and agreed with the article. Some other participants recounted stories in which their parents monitored their children’s posts closely. When parents found their children’s posts were different from their expectations, they tried to educate their children to “do the right thing” or “say the right thing.” These behaviors inevitably triggered a significant amount of privacy turbulence.

Homosexuality is another topic on which Chinese parents were reported as repeatedly seeking to change their adult children’s minds. Participant 12.5 recalled a story about his friend coming out as gay via a post on Pengyou Quan. When the parents of the gay student saw the post, they started to phone his friends, asking them to “help their son become normal.” As a consequence, many participants stated that they learned to either self-censor their posts or block their parents on mobile social media.

Young people’s frustration at their inability to educate their parents

In this study, we found that many college students also expressed frustration about their inability to help their parents distinguish between real and fake news on mobile social media. When participants were invited to talk about their interactions with their parents, the answers most commonly involved the students’ discovery of fake news on their parents’ Pengyou Quan. At first, many young people tried to inform their parents that such news stories circulated widely on mobile social media were fake, but their parents firmly rejected their explanations. Socialization of societal values and perceptions usually flows only one way from parents to children, and seldom from children to parents. After many such similar interactions, young people claimed to have given up their attempts to improve their parents’ social media literacy. Some participants stated that they simply stayed silent when their parents posted rumors or fake news on their Pengyou Quan, because they had been unsuccessful at changing their parents’ minds. Participant 12.5 said, “I told my parents about how many of their shared contents on social media were false, but they just ignored me.” Similarly, Participant 12.3 recalled, “My mother often forwards me social media contents that she strongly believes to be true. No matter how hard I have tried to point out that they are fake, she will not listen.”

In addition, it was found that parents’ authoritative communication style also impeded their children from trying to help with their parents’ social media literacy. Participant 7.5 attributed his silence to the social norms of his family:

I stay quiet about their fake news posts because I don’t want to become the black sheep of the family. All of them [the other family members] feel the same way. Even if I disagree with them, I don’t have the authority to say this. I am the youngest in the family.

This quote suggests an unequal power structure between Chinese parents and their adult children. Parents demanded young people change their remarks on social media, but young people considered themselves to be powerless to change parents’ posting and forwarding behaviors.

RQ3: Privacy turbulence and privacy management

This set of research questions aims to understand what are the privacy turbulence instances that Chinese young people have experienced with their parents in regard to social media usage (RQ3a), and how they managed their privacy afterwards (RQ3b).

RQ3a: Privacy turbulence in family communication on mobile social media

Networked privacy disclosure

As people are increasingly connected to multiple others on social platforms such as WeChat, the participants were fully aware that their privacy extends beyond one-on-one communication. Many participants reported privacy turbulence with their parents via other relatives or peers on the same mobile social media platform. For instance, Participant 1.3 reported that although she had changed her privacy settings to make a particular post about her relationship problems invisible to her parents, her aunt read the post on WeChat and told her parents about it, after which her parents called her to ask for details. This breach of privacy deeply disturbed her and led her to become much more careful about concealing her posts from people other than her parents.

“My parents argued with my friends.”

Due to the connectedness of mobile social media, parents are able to see the authentic interactions between their children and their peers on such platforms. The authenticity of peer communication on social media usually is reflected in the word choices, tones, and topics which are exclusively used among young people and often perceived to be inappropriate from parents’ perspectives. Participant 11.5 narrated an incident in which a friend of his had commented on his post using vernacular and sarcastic language. His parents read the friend’s comment and interpreted it as a personal attack to their son. Therefore, the parents got into a fight with his friend in the comments section of this post on WeChat. This participant said, “It was an embarrassing experience.” As a result, he filtered his parents out for controversial posts on WeChat to avoid possible arguments between his parents and peers.

RQ3b: Young people’s strategic privacy management against parents

Sneakily “unfriending” parents

Many participants reported that they “unfriended” their parents without notifying them. In this way, parents would think they were still friends with their adult children online, and they did not see their children posting because their children just have no updates on social media. Participant 7.2 stated, “I just unfriended my parents completely on WeChat after all the turbulence.”

Segmenting communication goals of various mobile social media

Some participants segmented mobile social media for various audiences. Participant 7.5 described that he constructed a positive image of himself on WeChat because his parents monitored his posts. He also used Qzone (a popular mobile social platform in China for blogging) to show his real identity because his friends are there. He said, “When I skip classes for fun things or movies, I blog them on Qzone not on WeChat.” However, when he posted selfies on WeChat of himself studying at the library or winning awards, he would purposefully invite his parents to take a look at such posts on WeChat.

Filtering out parents for specific posts

A more common strategy is to make sensitive posts invisible to parents while keep other general posts open for them. Some participants explained that their parents would become suspicious if they were unfriended and thereby unable to see their children’s updates on WeChat. Therefore, the best practice was to keep parents updated with some appropriate posts conforming to their expectations while hiding other sensitive posts. Participant 7.6 said he filtered out parents for his late-night postings or complaints about insufficient money for expenditures. Another male student said, “It would be embarrassing for me if my parents saw me with girls in pictures. I usually block these posts for them. Otherwise, they would ask me for details.”

Discussion

This study explores how “friending” one’s parents on mobile social media further impacts parent–child communication from the perspective of Chinese college students. It contributes to CPM theory by providing in-depth qualitative data to discuss motivation and culture regarding privacy management in a collectivist culture. This study also extends FCPs to a mobile social media context. This study highlights the role of parental conformity orientation on social media. It also discovers young adults’ desire to improve parents’ social media literacy.

In terms of privacy management motivation in CPM theory, this study complements existing quantitative research and offers a developmental perspective. Our data resonate with Kennedy-Lightsey and Frisby’s (2016) finding about parents’ privacy invasion. We found that many Chinese parents perceive themselves to have co-ownership of their adult children’s social media posts and thereby enact privacy invasion behaviors, such as further inquiring sensitive posts or even arguing with their children’s friends online. More importantly, after becoming "friends" with parents on mobile social media for a while, many participants reported using stricter privacy protective strategies against parents after privacy turbulence with them. This study underscores the fluidity of privacy management motivation on mobile social media and calls for more long-term in-depth studies on CPM.

This study also highlights a nuanced role of Chinese culture in CPM theory: parents’ authority is still conserved on mobile social media, but young people’s definition of privacy boundaries on social media is culturally different from their parents’. Chinese parents forward contents such as how to achieve mainstream success to their children and monitor their children’s social activities on mobile social media. Young people use mobile social media for strategic personal curation to construct their positive images for parents. This finding resonates with Chu and Choi’s (2010) study, which reported that Chinese young people demonstrated much more passion and efforts for positive self-presentation than their American counterparts on social media. In our study, young adults purposefully posted contents tailored to their parents’ expectations instead of openly negotiating privacy boundaries with them, which speaks to the notion that the authoritarian parenting style and cultural value of respecting seniors still exist in Chinese families (Chao, 1994).

However, many participants also discussed their resistance to parental privacy invasion as a result of their private expression of young people’s own values and behaviors on WeChat, which reflects a cultural difference of privacy boundaries between the two generations. For example, Chinese parents are keen to promote mainstream success for their children, whereas their adult children resisted firmly and aligned themselves with the pessimistic “funeral culture.” Compared with the parental generation, this young generation has received a much better education, including the opportunity to learn English and digital literacy. They are active in voicing their different opinions in the Chinese public sphere (Feng, Cai, & Gu, 2013). The “funeral culture” is found to be popular among Chinese young people. A similar culture has been observed among America’s millennial generation whose typical characteristics are demotivation, self-centeredness, and preference for differences rather than conformity (Twenge, Miller, & Campbell, 2014). Chinese young people’s “funeral culture” is their resistance to China’s collectivistic ideology of success. While young people considered embracing “funeral culture” on WeChat as a private behavior, parents responded as if they were still responsible to correct their children’s mindset on this medium. This controversy about privacy boundaries mirrors a deep conflict between the collectivistic culture of the parental generation and the emerging individualistic culture of the young generation in current Chinese society.

This study contributes to FCP theory by exploring affordances of mobile social media for family communication online. The data suggest that families’ offline communication is generally parallel to its online communication on mobile social media after young people’s friending of parents—families who had active and transparent discussions about any topic are likely to also be active on mobile social media, whereas families who had few common topics offline largely maintain the same communication patterns after parents have been “friended.”

This study also enriches FCP scholarship by showing young people’s resistance even in conformity-oriented families. Recent scholarship in FCP theory focuses on parental conformity orientation’s predictive power on their children’s privacy protection strategies (Bridge & Schrodt, 2013; Hesse et al., 2017; Kennedy-Lightsey & Frisby, 2016; Petronio, 2017). Not surprisingly, this study also finds Chinese parents’ conformity orientation to communicate with their adult children on mobile social media. However, few studies have reported adult children’s desire to improve parents’ social media literacy. This study reported Chinese young people’s failed efforts to socialize parents about fake news on social media. This phenomenon demonstrates the struggle for power in family communication online between the two generations, which is worth further investigating.

Furthermore, although strengthening family solidarity via new communication technologies was found to be a salient communication goal among Chinese families (Lam, 2013), the current study finds that this goal is one-sided from the Chinese parents’ perspectives. In this study, Chinese young adults rarely categorized their parents as the major audience of their social media posts. Instead, many participants considered their parents to be unwelcome readers of their posts who might interfere with their privacy and thereby should be carefully managed. This finding calls for more sophisticated research on mobile social media’s affordances for family communication.

Regarding practical implications, the findings of this study suggest parents should be more tolerant and less judgmental about young people’s different opinions on mobile social media. Thus, mobile social media could create more communication opportunities for the family. In addition, this study reminds parents that the existing communication patterns in the family may repeat themselves on mobile social media; therefore, to become a welcome guest to adult children’s mobile social media profiles, parents should create an open and tolerant communication environment offline first. In particular, parents should pay attention to the individualistic trends among young adults. On the other hand, we also call for the young generation’s understanding of the historical, cultural, and political background of their parents, which cultivates their parents’ conformity orientation in family communication. Young people’s empathy for their parents based on such understanding can facilitate mutual understanding and quality intergenerational communication.

One of the limitations of this study is the lack of data from the parents’ perspectives. Future studies could further examine parents’ attitudes and actual behaviors on mobile social media with their adult children. Another limitation is that the data are based on young people’s perceptions of their interactions with parents on mobile social media. Future content analysis of actual interactions between the two generations on mobile social media can provide more concrete data for this topic. A third limitation lies in the methodology of focus groups for the topic of this study. The topic of privacy management on mobile social media can be too personal for some participants to comment publicly in front of peers. One-on-one qualitative interviews would better protect the privacy of participants and elicit more personal narratives. We invite future studies to employ face-to-face interviews to further explore this topic.

Although gender had an effect on the activeness of the focus groups during data collection, when we compared themes generated from different gender groups, we did not find salient gender differences. Therefore, the factor of gender is not explored in the Results section. Future quantitative studies may verify if the gender factor plays a key role in parent–child relationships on mobile social media. In addition, quantitative follow-up studies would be helpful to understand this phenomenon on a large scale and evaluate the effects of different variables in this study about family communication on mobile social media. Although this study implies potential cultural differences for “friending” parents on mobile social media, more cross-cultural studies should be conducted to validate and explore such differences. To validate the characteristics of young people’s privacy management regarding their parents, future comparative research is still needed to examine young people’s privacy management strategies involving other parties such as strangers, peers, and teachers.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was supported by Fujian Province Soft Science Program under Grant Number 2018R0093 to He Gong.

ORCID iD

He Gong

Author biographies

Sumin Fang is a PhD candidate and instructor at the Department of Communication, University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests focus on public relations, new technology, and health communication.

He Gong is an associate professor at the Department of Advertising, School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University. Her research interests include public relations, health communication, and social media.

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