Abstract:

In the digital age, the contradiction between mobile games and parents and children is becoming more common. Parental surveillance on mobile phones allows access to digital conversations and photos, enabling continuous contact with young people. Additionally, the emergence of applications, such as youth protection models and parental controls, legally facilitates parents in monitoring their children's online behaviour (Boyd & Hargittai, 2013). Lachace's (2019) study underscores the adaptability of teenagers to parental monitoring. Furthermore, in 2021, the Chinese government published a policy regarding the time and money youth can spend on mobile games. Now the anti-panopticon theory is designed from the reflection of the panopticon theory by Foucault (1975), the new theory's strength is that in the digital era, teenagers sometimes can sense their parents' supervision on the use of electronic products. In a closed environment, minors can make some false moves to evade their parents' supervision and gain their parents' approval. However, with the collapse of trust, parents will no longer trust the behaviour of minors and will increase their supervision over them. At the same time, minors will begin to reject their parents' behaviours both physically and mentally, leading to a vicious cycle in family relationships. In this paper, it will use the case study from China about how youth mobile gaming behaviour impact by state intervention and how parents' surveillance affects the family relationship.

Keywords:

Family relationship, anti-panopticon theory, digital era.