Vietnamese Families Negotiating Glocal Intimacies: YouTube Appropriation, Home-Based Learning, and Digital Parenting Ideologies

Existing research has revealed established, culturally unique principles that constitute traditional ideologies of parenting in Vietnam. Yet investigation into the influence of mobile media and global/local pressures on children and parenting practices in the Vietnamese household is negligible. This chapter examines how YouTube is appropriated for children’s learning in the Vietnamese domestic space. It also unpacks how the Vietnamese public versus individual Vietnamese parents enact, debate, and negotiate digital parenting ideologies and glocal intimacies. Using netnography, my data set includes 43 online news articles, 1460 public comments, and online interviews with 15 Vietnamese parents. My findings suggested that the Vietnamese public held and prescribed more local, conservative values, while the interviewed parents embraced a more global, transnational, and innovative outlook. A seemingly media-heavy discussion on YouTube’s roles in Vietnamese children’s home-based learning can become highly contested and diverging when we pay close attention to significant cultural tensions. Parents are irreplaceable agents in negotiating conflicting cultural values and societal expectations for their children’s development through mobile media.