Living Through the Parameters of Technology: Filipino Mothers in Diaspora and Their Mediated Parenting Experiences
Article

The ongoing diaspora of Filipino parents in the era of neoteric communication media and technologies (CMT) has progressively been cultivating an innovative breed of Filipino parenting. While migrant parents primarily leave the country to provide for their children, this genre of parenting, which the author labels as “communicated parenting,” offers migrant parents the opportunity to function beyond economic provision by allowing them to parent their children despite the distance. Indeed, extant literature confirms that Filipino migrant mothers engage in communicated parenting through long-distance communication and CMT use. But how do migrant mothers genuinely assess the communication technologies that they use in their communicated parenting and how do they manage the capacities and limitations of these technologies? In keeping with the perspective of Apparatgeist, this article scopes the “experienced parameters” of technologies, or the capacities and limitations of technologies as experienced by Singapore-based Filipino migrant mothers, as well as their attempts to manage these experienced parameters in their efforts to parent their teenage children even across borders.