Parents’ news mediation in a risk society: Navigating trust, anxiety and digital literacy

Abstract

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.