Parenting Across Borders

The plenary session that I attended was entitled "Parenting across Borders" by Professor Maria Rosel San Pascual. The study is about how communicated parenting functioned for mothers who are working in Singapore and their children, particularly teenagers, who are residing in the Philippines.

As discussed in the plenary session, parenting serves as a visual activity and as a tactile activity. Visual activity involves the parents "seeing" that their children are alright. Tactile activity involves personal care giving, such as exchanging of hugs and kisses. (San Pascual, 2013) Several ways to overcome physical distance were also discussed. This is where long-distance communication enters. This is made possible by CMT or Communication Media and Technologies. Communicated parenting is made through talks and conversations mediated by technology, such as Skype, Yahoo Messenger and Facebook. Communicated parenting also addresses the challenges of physical distance. One is that concerning with the visual activities, communicated updates from the mothers and the children's caregiver occur. To sum up the study, it was emphasized that "communicated parenting" is a fundamental part of long-distance parenting.

As the conference's theme "Communication Research in a Glocalized World," glocalization must be first defined. Glocalization, according to Craig Stroupe, is a process whereby localities develop direct economic and cultural relationships to the global system through information technologies, bypassing and subverting traditional power hierarchies like national governments and markets. (Stroupe, n.d.) In other words, it involves the conciliation of the inevitable globalization with localized everyday life. Its goal is to guarantee a globalized world, alongside with the preservation of the culture and tradition of local areas. Relating it to the plenary session by Professor San Pascual, it is identified as a process in which everything goes along with the globalized world, but still manages to stay with what has been traditional. It played out in the discussion as how the parents nurture their children despite the distance. In the era of globalization and mobility, parents abroad stay in touch to their children through computer-mediated communication. Concurrently, they try to reach and nurture their children the traditional way, such as talking to them and asking them how their day was, what did they do at school, etc. They talk like it seems that they can see what their children are doing. As much as possible, parents try to be updated with the lives of their children.

In relation to media, communicated parenting is not new anymore especially in the Filipino context. Transnational labor migration has been present in the country even before 20th century. The present era has the advantage of computer-mediated communication compared to the use of snail mail before. In fact, Filipino movies