Mobile Instant Messaging and the Maintenance of Parent-Child Relationships: A Case Study of Taiwan’s Long-Distance Families

Long-distance families, where parents and children live apart, are very common. With the growing popularity of smart phones and wireless networks, mobile instant messaging (MIM) has gradually become an important platform for maintaining parent-child relationships. Conducting in-depth interviews with 22 long-distance families, this thesis explores how parents communicate with their children after the introduction of MIM into long-distance families. The research results that gender differences between father and mother plays a crucial role in parent-child communication. One the one hand, gendered division of parenting deeply affects the parent-child communication behavior. On the other hand, the characteristics of MIM and social factors also affect the communication behavior and intimacy between parents and children. Generally speaking, this paper concludes that MIM does more good than harm to long-distance parent-child relationships. In contrast to the past literature, this thesis finds that MIM help fathers to communicate with their children better in traditional families. Furthermore, the enhancement of relationships between fathers and children is better than that between mothers and children.