Parental mediation of news media discourses on children’s well-being and safety: a longitudinal qualitative study of risk, anxiety and relational sense-making

This article explores how parents engage with news media in relation to their children’s relationships and well-being. Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study involving three rounds of interviews and a WhatsApp diary study with 30 parents in England, we examine how media narratives about youth risk, safety and development are interpreted within everyday family life. We argue that news operates not simply as a source of information but as an ambient force shaping emotions, perceptions and parental reflections. Parents navigate diffuse moral atmospheres in which stories about violence, digital risk or social change amplify concern, yet their responses are neither panicked nor passive. Instead, parents engage in filtering, sense-making and relational judgement, shaped by structural conditions, social networks and personal histories. We show how the parental mediation of news is co-constituted by affective, algorithmic and relational dynamics. In doing so, the article offers new insight into how contemporary parenting unfolds within media-saturated cultures of risk and how public narratives are negotiated in everyday family life.