Dr Maria-Nerina Boursinou

This paper explores how parents in England navigate news media as a source and site of concern in the context of raising children within a risk society, addressing parental anxiety, misinformation and news literacy concerns. Drawing on a three-wave qualitative longitudinal study with 30 parents, we examine how parents’ own struggles with digital news – marked by misinformation, distrust and emotional saturation – shape their mediation practices and anxieties about their children’s engagements. We show how parents negotiate the tensions between protection and autonomy, balancing surveillance with critical digital literacy, and how these dynamics vary across children’s developmental stages. Our findings reveal a form of recursive anxiety, where parents’ concerns about their own media experiences amplify their perceived responsibility to shield and guide their children, particularly in relation to social media and algorithmic influence. By situating these findings within debates on intensive parenting, media literacy and risk society, we highlight how news engagement becomes a key terrain through which parents perform and contest “good parenting” in the digital age.

This study examines how parents in England interpret and respond to environmental and climate news, and how these engagements shape emotional experiences and everyday parenting practices. Using a longitudinal qualitative design utilising semi-structured interviews and WhatsApp diaries, the paper explores how parents negotiate environmental news within broader emotional climates marked by anxiety, uncertainty, and constrained agency. While participants widely recognised climate change as urgent and morally significant, reporting that was abstract, episodic, or sensationalised often felt distant, overwhelming, and difficult to translate into meaningful action. Parents were more responsive to local and solution-oriented forms of reporting that enabled tangible forms of care, agency, and role-modelling within family life. Engagement with environmental news was shaped by parents' dual role as both individuals and caregivers responsible for children's futures, producing ongoing forms of emotion work and emotional reflexivity through which participants negotiated tensions between responsibility, concern, and limited feelings of control. The findings contribute to the sociology of emotions by showing how climate-related anxieties are socially mediated through parental identities, moral expectations, and everyday practices. The paper concludes by arguing for more sustained, locally relevant, and actionable forms of environmental reporting capable of fostering meaningful public engagement with climate and environmental issues.