Dr Maria-Nerina Boursinou

This paper explores how parents construct and manage risks in their children's post-digital lives, including how they respond to news media, public discourse, and everyday concerns about online safety and well-being. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study conducted with 30 parents in England, we analyse how risk is framed through spatial, symbolic, and relational logics that reflect broader socio-cultural anxieties. While digital risks are typically framed as distinct and exceptional, our findings suggest parents struggle to sustain clear boundaries between online and offline harms. We identify four interrelated themes: how parents distinguish between online and offline risks; how threats are imagined as both close to home and distant; how digital life produces uncertainty about what is real or trustworthy; and how parents develop different strategies for managing their children's digital lives depending on their experiences, emotions, and resources. These findings are situated within the ecological and post-digital theoretical frameworks, highlighting how parental sense-making is shaped not only by digital technologies but also by emotional labour, cultural narratives, and institutional failures. We argue that risk is not simply managed at the individual or family level but negotiated within complex social ecologies. The paper contributes to digital parenting, childhood risk, and the post-digital condition, calling for responses that move beyond binary logics and recognise the interdependent, emotionally charged and structurally embedded nature of contemporary parenting.

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.