“Parenting by Proxy”: Digital Intimacy in Chinese Families With Children in UK Boarding Schools

This article examines how digital technologies mediate social ties and transnational family relationships within contemporary Chinese elite education migration. It focuses on families who send children, often from the age of 11, to prestigious British boarding schools, while the parents remain in China. For many families, overseas schooling is a long‐term project oriented toward mobility, security, and social distinction. Yet physical separation introduces new emotional strains and asymmetries of dependence. Through WeChat calls, digital homework platforms, shared academic monitoring, and regular visits, parents sustain what I term “parenting by proxy”: a form of digitally mediated intimacy that combines affection, anxiety, and oversight. Digital infrastructures embed parents in their children’s daily routines, enabling them to monitor academic progress, advise on friendships, and guide everyday decisions despite geographic distance. Within the boarding school environment, but through a globally connected network of actors, who act as intermediaries, translating parental expectations into institutional norms of independence and self‐management. The school becomes a site in which autonomy is cultivated but remains digitally permeable to familial authority. Rather than weakening kinship, distance redistributes care across screens, platforms, and proxy actors. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2021 and 2023 among families, students, private tutors, and guardians, the article introduces the analytical concept of “parenting by proxy” to capture this migration experience and the reconfiguration of family connections amid long‐term separation. I examine how digital mediation reconfigures parental responsibility. I argue that distance and outsourced care are managed through digital communication, institutional discipline, and kinship expectations, reshaping parental care and authority across space. Transnational family life, therefore, is constituted not by absence but by mediated presence as intimacy, obligation, and authority are continuously renegotiated across borders.