Abstract
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.
Introduction
In contemporary Western societies, parenting has become increasingly saturated with risk consciousness, reflecting broader transformations in how childhood, safety, and responsibility are imagined and enacted (Beck, 1992; Furedi, 2002; Lee et al., 2014). Parents are positioned as vigilant risk managers, tasked with navigating and pre-empting multiple forms of harm within increasingly complex socio-technical environments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in relation to children’s digital lives, where media, policy, and popular discourse construct online spaces as inherently dangerous and categorically distinct from ‘real life’ (Stern and Burke Odland, 2017).
These framings amplify parental anxiety, while reinforcing binary logics of online/offline and safe/unsafe, often at odds with how young people experience their digitally mediated lives. Research in post-digital theory and youth digital cultures highlights the hybridity and entanglement of online and offline experiences, where affective, material, and embodied dimensions cut across digital–physical boundaries (Nelson et al., 2020; Ringrose et al., 2024). For many young people, this hybridity is not experienced as a novel or transitional condition but as the taken-for-granted context of everyday life, reflecting a generation that has grown up with digitally mediated sociality as a routine feature of childhood.
Parental anxieties about these developments are embedded within broader cultural constructions of childhood as a period of heightened vulnerability requiring adult protection (James and James, 2008; Kehily, 2004). Within these discourses, childhood sexuality in particular is positioned as something requiring careful regulation and protection (Jackson and Scott, 2010). As a result, concerns about children’s digital lives tend to crystallise around two overlapping sets of risks. On the one hand, a range of broader technological harms – such as fraud, misinformation, and manipulation – are frequently framed as uniquely threatening to children, despite adults encountering many of the same risks in digital environments. On the other hand, digital media are imagined as sites where children may encounter forms of knowledge, intimacy, or sexual expression considered to belong to the adult domain. Contemporary parenting cultures therefore position children as both precious and fragile, and as the symbolic future of society, intensifying expectations that parents anticipate and manage potential threats within digitally mediated environments.
This paper examines how parents conceptualise and navigate digital-related risks in their children’s lives, tracing how their narratives reflect and reproduce broader cultural logics, spatial imaginaries, and ambivalent mediation strategies. Drawing on three rounds of qualitative data with 30 parents in England, we analyse how risk is framed not just as a matter of spatial or technical concern, but as a symbolic and relational issue shaped by emotion, media discourse, and structural constraint. Our analysis is situated within post-digital theory (e.g. Nelson et al., 2020; Ringrose et al., 2024) and ecological frameworks of digital risk (e.g. Livingstone et al., 2018; Phippen, 2025), which highlight the limitations of binary framings and individualised risk management. We offer empirical insight into how parents negotiate risk in relation to broader public narratives and personal contexts, showing how their accounts – though often framed through binary distinctions – reveal post-digital ambiguity and contradiction. We advance post-digital and ecological approaches by revealing how parental sense-making is embedded in affective labour, responsibilisation, and socio-cultural positioning. Through this, we contribute to more context-sensitive and relational understandings of parenting, childhood, and digital safety.
Ecological approaches to youth post-digital life
Understanding how parents construct and respond to risk in their children’s lives requires moving beyond simplistic binaries of ‘online’ versus ‘offline’. Across a growing body of scholarship, post-digital theorists, digital parenting researchers, and proponents of ecological models of risk argue for more integrated, relational, and context-sensitive accounts of young people’s digital and social experiences. These perspectives recognise that young people inhabit hybrid realities, in which digital and embodied lives are mutually constitutive and embedded in broader social, emotional, and institutional contexts. We synthesise these literatures to foreground how parents’ perceptions of risk are shaped by affective, symbolic, and structural forces that complicate clear-cut understandings of safety, danger, proximity, and control.
Post-digital scholarship emerged in response to the inadequacy of ‘digital dualism’: the idea that online and offline lives are separate domains. Foundational work critiques this binary (Jurgenson, 2011), highlighting how social, intimate, and relational practices unfold across digital and physical spaces in overlapping and dynamic ways, meaning that digital and social lives are no longer separable (Jandrić et al., 2019). The term post-digital does not imply a period after digital technologies but rather describes a condition in which digital media are fully embedded in everyday life through devices – smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and Internet-connected televisions – and are, therefore, no longer experienced as separate from domestic and social reality (Jandrić et al., 2019). In this context, distinctions between online and offline environments become increasingly blurred, as everyday relationships, communication, and identity formation unfold across hybrid digital–physical spaces.
This theorising is particularly evident in studies of young people, whose everyday lives exemplify the hybridity and fluidity that post-digital theory seeks to capture. Their interactions on social networking platforms operate as ‘networked publics’ (boyd, 2011), extending in-person interactions and ‘spilling over’ into embodied settings such as schools and peer groups (Ringrose et al., 2024). Nelson et al. (2020) advance this by proposing ‘offlineness’ to conceptualise youth engagement as a continuum, rather than through strict online/offline dichotomies. Building on this, Setty and Dobson (2025) use a critical realist lens to show how digital connections during the COVID-19 lockdown were emotionally and materially entangled, offering intimacy while producing constraint. Das (2024) similarly illustrates this entanglement through the concept of ‘approximation’, showing how new mothers during lockdown worked to replicate in-person support through digitally mediated ties, revealing the emotional labour, fatigue, and unsettled quality of digital intimacy. Together, these studies challenge fixed boundaries between online and offline, suggesting that digital life is lived, felt, and navigated through embodied, relational, and socio-technical entanglements.
One particular area of focus includes young people’s post-digital sexual citizenship, which explores how sexuality, risk, and identity are negotiated across digital and offline spaces. Ringrose et al. (2025) argue that adolescents experience risk and peer dynamics as fluid across platforms and physical settings, where a private image can quickly circulate through gossip or viral sharing. Their framework challenges safeguarding models that treat online harm as distinct from offline experiences, instead of advocating for a relational and embedded understanding of risk, agency, and response. Evans and Ringrose (2025) further this argument, addressing the blurred lines between human and non-human actors. Through their conceptualisation of post-digital intimacies, they emphasise that connections and vulnerabilities are increasingly mediated by algorithms, platforms, and digital therapeutics. These infrastructures do not simply host interaction; they shape affective intensities, normative expectations, and the very conditions of emotional and social life.
While this body of work disrupts binary thinking about young people’s digital lives, research on parenting finds that binaries remain powerful in how risk is imagined and acted upon. Studies of parental mediation illustrate how digital environments are often framed as morally charged spaces requiring surveillance, restriction, or enabling dialogue (Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020; Livingstone et al., 2017). Parental responses are shaped by broader anxieties, value systems, and socio-cultural scripts about ‘good parenting’, rather than just technical skill. Classic theoretical work by Douglas (2002 [1996]) and others reminds us that ‘risk’ is not just an objective fact, but a collective cultural construct tied to values and norms. This means that what parents view as ‘risky’ often reflects cultural narratives about good parenting and threats to the social order. Furedi’s (2002) influential critique further articulates how a ‘culture of fear’ has reshaped parenting norms, tracing a shift from tangible, localised fears to diffuse, ever-present danger. In this context, parents are cast as risk managers responsible for protecting children, who are understood to be particularly vulnerable to harm. Parenting increasingly involves anticipating and pre-empting potential threats within an uncertain and rapidly changing social world (Lee et al., 2014).
Discourses of risk are age-graded, shaping expectations about parenting across childhood and adolescence. In early childhood, risk is often framed through discourses of innocence, passivity, and dependency (James and James, 2008; Kehily, 2004), emphasising parental control, surveillance, and protection. As children enter adolescence, the discourse becomes more ambivalent: while adolescents are still cast as vulnerable, they are also constructed as increasingly autonomous, with expectations of competence and resilience (Livingstone et al., 2018; Mascheroni and Ólafsson, 2014). These shifts mirror wider societal framings of adolescence as a liminal period between innocence and autonomy, where boundaries of parental responsibility and adolescent agency are constantly negotiated (Bragg and Buckingham, 2013), complicating parental roles and responsibilities.
This broader discursive cultural climate underpins contemporary concerns about digital technologies that are often imagined as new, poorly understood spaces of danger. Risk discourses about childhood have migrated into the digital realm, with the Internet having become a lightning rod for concerns previously attached to physical spaces, such as fears of ‘stranger danger’, moral decline, and exposure to ‘inappropriate’ content. Research on parental mediation highlights the complexity of navigating this terrain. Classic typologies distinguish between restrictive mediation (imposing limits or rules), enabling or active mediation (engaging in dialogue or co-use), and technical mediation (using filters or monitoring tools), with restrictive strategies reducing both opportunities and risks, and enabling approaches associated with greater digital skills although also with increased risk (Livingstone et al., 2017). Mediation is, therefore, never neutral; it involves trade-offs, value judgements, and situational judgement, shaped not just by technical know-how but also by broader aspirations and anxieties about parenting (Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020), including as mediated through news coverage and policy discourses that shape parental imaginations of risk and fuel anxiety (Critcher, 2008).
Empirical research consistently challenges the portrayal of online life as uniquely risky, finding that digital and physical risks are deeply interconnected (Haddon and Livingstone, 2014; Livingstone and Third, 2017), emerging through intersecting relationships, inequalities, and institutional dynamics. Ecological and systems-based models provide a framework for understanding this post-digital complexity. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory, scholars conceptualise digital risk as emerging from interactions across multiple levels including families, peer groups, schools, platforms, media narratives and broader cultural norms, and socio-political structures (McCosker, 2016). Phippen (2025) terms this an ‘online safety ecosystem’, where effective responses require coordination and shared responsibility across domains. Online risks are thus not reducible to individual or parental oversight but emerge from dynamic interplays across these interconnected systems.
Digital resilience, too, has been reimagined not as an individual trait but a relational and contextual capacity shaped by young people’s support networks, access to resources, and institutional responsiveness (Livingstone et al., 2026; Third et al., 2018). Rather than isolating incidents (e.g. cyber-bullying or image-based abuse), risks are framed through relationships, structures, and technologies. Crucially, this perspective foregrounds structural inequality and collective accountability: who is most at risk and who can access support is shaped by class, race, gender, disability, and other intersecting factors (Harrison, 2013; Tsaliki, 2022). From this perspective, resilience emerges from the quality of young people’s relationships with parents, teachers, and peers and the safety of their digital environments (Phippen, 2025). Ecological models ask: what enables young people to navigate risk, recover from harm, and develop healthy online identities? The answers span personal (e.g. critical thinking), interpersonal (e.g. parental dialogue), and systemic (e.g. inclusive platform design) factors, unfolding through structural conditions of inequality.
Taken together, these literatures highlight the limits of individualised and binary framings of digital risks, offering a more expansive view that situates young people’s post-digital lives within networks of relationships, infrastructures, and social conditions. In this paper, we examine how parents navigate these tensions, specifically how they draw on binary distinctions, experience post-digital ambiguity, and negotiate mediation within affectively charged and structurally shaped landscapes. We consider the arc of childhood, from early years to late adolescence, examining how digital risks and parenting strategies are conceptualised across the life course. We capture how risk framings shift across the parenting journey, how parental concerns evolve in relation to children’s growing autonomy, and how binary constructions of safety, proximity, and digital life are negotiated by parents.
Methodology
This study employed a longitudinal qualitative design to explore how parents conceptualise risks in their children’s lives and their engagements with news media about risk, safety, and well-being. The project consisted of three rounds of fieldwork with 30 parents (17 mothers and 13 fathers), designed to deepen rapport and reflective engagement with participants over the period. It included semi-structured interviews and a WhatsApp diary study. Interviews were conducted between November 2024 and April 2025, with WhatsApp diaries completed before the third round. This paper draws upon data from all three rounds.
Participants were based in Southeast England and varied in socio-economic background, digital literacy, parenting experience, and household composition. While the sample shared some commonalities, they brought different perspectives on how risk is experienced, conceptualised, and managed in everyday life. To account for this diversity, our methodological approach was informed by communications and media reception studies (Ytre-Arne and Das, 2018) and grounded in a situated sense-making framework (Reinhard and Dervin, 2012). This lens allowed us to explore how parents make meaning in context, drawing on personal experience, social values, and structural conditions in ways that may reinforce, adapt, or resist dominant discourses.
Participants were recruited through social media (Facebook, Twitter/X) and a research recruitment agency, with care taken to ensure a socio-demographically diverse sample (see Table 1). We asked participants about their gender, parental role (mother/father), and age and gender of children. While mothers were overrepresented, this reflects wider gendered patterns in parenting research and media engagement. Socio-economic position was not formally measured. Instead, participants sometimes referred to their financial circumstances, housing situations, employment, and everyday constraints during interviews and diary entries. The research team drew on these accounts as interpretive indicators of participants’ broader structural positioning. These researcher-generated analytical readings were used cautiously to situate participants’ narratives within wider socio-economic contexts and to consider how material resources and social positioning may shape parental perspectives on risk and digital mediation.
Participants.
As recruitment partly relied on online channels and a digital recruitment agency, participants were likely to be at least minimally digitally engaged. While this may introduce a degree of sampling bias, it also reflects the everyday embeddedness of digital media in contemporary parenting contexts. In a few cases, participant withdrawals were replaced to preserve sample balance and continuity.
The first round of interviews took place in spring/summer 2024 and focused on parenting values, children’s well-being, and everyday concerns. This included discussion of digital technologies, peer relationships, and relational development. The second round took place in autumn/winter 2024 and deepened this inquiry with questions about emerging digital risks and parental perceptions of children’s online and offline engagements. The third round took place in spring 2025 and combined a WhatsApp diary, with follow-up interviews exploring their broader concerns and parenting strategies. For the diary, participants were asked to share reflections, screenshots, or brief messages over a one-week period about media stories, parenting experiences or concerns related to children’s safety and well-being. Diary methods are widely used to capture everyday experiences in situ, reducing reliance on retrospective recall and enabling insight into unfolding practices and emotions (Bolger et al., 2003; Neale, 2021). Participants were prompted daily but were free to contribute at their own pace, enabling the capture of contemporaneous reflections that complemented the more retrospective accounts produced in interviews. All interviews were conducted by a consistent research team, with each participant interviewed by the same researcher across rounds to build rapport and depth across the three rounds.
Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006, 2019). Coding was conducted collaboratively by the research team. Initial coding was undertaken by the researcher who conducted each interview, after which themes were discussed and refined through iterative team meetings to ensure interpretive consistency and analytical depth. Initial codes reflected core questions around spatial and digital framings of risk, the influence of socio-cultural contexts, and how participants reconcile multiple sources of knowledge (e.g. lived experience, media, and peer networks). As analysis progressed, we identified tensions, contradictions and ambivalences in participants’ accounts, tracing how socio-economic positioning, generational shifts, and digital literacy shaped the contours of parental sense-making. We focus here on how participants constructed risks to children’s well-being and safety, exploring how online/offline and near/far distinctions were invoked and negotiated in their narratives. We consider what these accounts suggest about perceptions of digital and social risk, while identifying implications in relation to post-digital theory, ecological models of risk, and wider debates on parenting, childhood, and youth. We foreground how symbolic binaries – online/offline, near/distant – inform parenting logics and how they may mis/align with theoretical frameworks treating young people’s lives as hybrid, networked, and fluid. Exemplar quotes included in this paper are illustrative of broader themes in the dataset, selected to reflect the range of perspectives and practices expressed. Quotations are labelled with pseudonyms, participant age, and data source (interview or WhatsApp diary) to provide contextual detail.
Ethical approval for the project was granted by the University of Surrey Ethics Committee [FASS 23-24 018 EGA]. All participants were anonymised using pseudonyms to ensure privacy and confidentiality.
Findings
Our analysis is organised around four interrelated themes that illuminate how participants made sense of risk in their children’s post-digital lives. These span symbolic distinctions parents drew between online and offline domains; spatial logics through which proximity and distance are moralised; slippages and ambiguities of post-digital life; and mediation strategies to manage uncertainty. These themes show how risk is navigated through overlapping emotional, spatial, and relational dynamics in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Binary framings of risk (online vs offline)
Participants recurrently constructed the digital world as distinct from offline everyday spaces. This conceptual boundary shaped their perceptions of risk and safety and informed their descriptions of their children’s behaviours. A recurring strand of this was the tendency to frame digital interactions as less ‘real’ or meaningful than those grounded in face-to-face or embodied settings, casting doubt on the authenticity or validity of online engagements. Nathan, for example, invoked a distinction between informational quality online and ‘real’ world knowledge: ‘I want to bring up my kids so they know what is going on in the world . . . But . . . they’re just on social media’ (interview, round 1), implying an eroded understanding while reinforcing a symbolic hierarchy between digital and physical terrains. Alice felt that the compulsion to document and share online undermines authentic embodied experience: ‘You’re becoming detached from the real world because you’re too focused on getting it there [on your phone] and sending on to someone else. I think that’s making us very insular and detached from reality’ (interview, round 3). She likened technology to excessive consumption, warning that ‘technology is a bit like eating, isn’t it? You have too much cake. You’re going to get big’, reinforcing a framing of digital use as something to be rationed and moderated.
Likewise, Phillip critiqued digital content as cognitively corrosive: ‘You can waste your life going on social media . . . it’s just rubbish’ (interview, round 1). He positioned digital life as fundamentally vacuous, a distraction from more meaningful or productive forms of engagement. He added that platforms were ‘intentionally designed . . . addictive’, concluding that ‘restrictions’ were the only solution, a point returned to below. Such constructions of digital as shallow and time-wasting reflect a broader cultural discourse shaping parental evaluations of children’s media use. Recalling his own childhood, Phillip said, ‘We’d go to the park . . . be gone for hours’, contrasting this freedom with today’s digital immersion and adding a generational, evaluative edge that casts digital engagement as insular and devoid of substantive value. Tomas, meanwhile, extended such concerns to AI and virtual learning, warning that digital immersion could displace formative in-person experiences: ‘Imagine if everyone’s just stuck in one computer screen . . . it would be really unhealthy’ (interview, round 2). He worried about the ‘mental health . . . eyes and backs’ of young people, suggesting that virtual learning might corrode embodied development. Such reflections echo broader patterns of nostalgic idealisation of childhood, in which past eras are remembered as simpler or safer despite historical evidence of recurring moral panics surrounding youth culture (Furedi, 2002; Kehily, 2004).
There were traces of digital exceptionalism in participants’ perceptions of danger. Digital spaces were cast as uniquely risky: sites of deception, grooming, manipulation, and irreversible reputational harm. Phillip described ‘catfishing’ as emblematic of deception, with his anecdote blending absurdity with potential danger, while reflecting a broader cultural narrative of online encounters as unpredictable and unknowable: ‘She looked like a supermodel but turned out to be an 80-year-old woman’ (interview, round 1). For Georgina, the unverifiable nature of online interactions led to both trivialisation and concern. She said her daughter’s burgeoning romantic relationship with someone she was talking to online was unlikely to ‘be too serious’ as they had never met in person (interview, round 1), reflecting a belief that emotional connection is diminished without spatial proximity. Yet she was also concerned about her daughter’s preference for engaging with ‘strangers’ online: ‘I don’t know who she’s talking to or what they’re saying to her’, with epistemic anxiety arising from the opacity of digital interactions and their resistance to parental oversight.
Others warned of psychological harm arising from algorithmic manipulation and lack of parental knowledge. Patrick was concerned that ‘what they’re [children] reading [online] . . . could influence them in bad ways’ (interview, round 2), with Alice suggesting children ‘get fed all sorts of things . . . the parents need to be educated’ (interview, round 2), reflecting a theme of parental responsibilisation returned to below. Across interviews, many participants attributed risk to the medium itself, where technological capabilities (e.g. image editing, artificial intelligence) become the source of potential harm. This underpinned a framing of the digital as inherently volatile and ungovernable. Megan, for instance, described how fake imagery could destroy reputations: ‘All of a sudden your life’s falling apart over a picture that’s not real’ (interview, round 2). The implication was that digital media is not merely a tool but a force that reshapes normative behaviours, in potentially morally disruptive ways. Daisy, having decided to restrict her son’s access to YouTube, spoke to the subtle influence of body image content on children’s well-being, linking it to eating disorders among girls: ‘They’ve suffered with anorexia and things . . . it always results back down to something they’ve seen . . . just so brainwashed now . . . even on YouTube Kids . . . some of the things that he [her son] was seeing’ (interview, round 3).
These perspectives suggest that part of what makes digital risk feel unmanageable is not only its technological reach, but the insidiousness of its effects, whereby harmful messages cannot easily be recognised, nor, therefore, processed, or managed. There was a persistent tendency among participants to draw on binary framings – online vs offline, real vs virtual, controllable vs uncontainable – to make sense of risk, reflecting a cultural logic of digital dualism (Jurgenson, 2011). Binary framings provided clarity in a landscape that felt overwhelming, where risk acted as a cultural ordering device marking boundaries between safety and danger (Douglas, 2002 [1966]). Yet, as we explore in the next theme, participants’ experiences contradicted these categories, with many describing risks in spatial and symbolic terms that could not always be neatly divided. The tension between conceptual simplicity and experiential complexity – including in participants’ mediation strategies, which we return to in the final theme – was emblematic of parenting in post-digital contexts.
Spatial framings of risk: near vs out-there
Parental risk perceptions were deeply spatialised, with participants constructing threats in terms of physical or symbolic distance. These spatial framings reflect broader cultural processes through which risk is symbolically organised and interpreted, with proximity associated with familiarity and safety and distance associated with uncertainty and threat (Douglas, 2002 [1966]), while mediated narratives can render distant dangers emotionally proximate (Critcher, 2008). Yet, some participants inverted this logic, framing even local environments as threatening. Megan, for example, described her area as saturated with threat, where every day public spaces were sites of danger: ‘Even going into my local shops . . . there’s always someone begging for money . . . getting arrested’ (interview, round 1). This inverted spatial logic may reflect a deeper erosion of social trust, where even familiar environments feel destabilised, amplifying the emotional burden of parental vigilance.
Though nearby spaces were problematised, distance still functioned symbolically. Media stories about child abductions or geopolitical instability elicited visceral identification, supporting foundational work on moral panic (Critcher, 2008) regarding how media circulation amplifies distant threats, making them emotionally resonant. Georgina, for instance, checked Facebook updates on a missing teenager abroad ‘to find out what the updates are’ (interview, round 1), while Patrick, referring to the same news story, imagined, ‘What if that was my son?’ (interview, round 1). Alice invoked localised knife crime fears, linked to national reporting, acknowledging that while ‘it’s not like I can’t walk down the street and think that somebody’s going to attack me . . . Do I look at somebody in the eye just in case?’ (interview, round 3). Megan described how even international events had emotional immediacy: ‘It doesn’t matter if it is international or next door . . . if I hear about it, it will bother me’ (interview, round 1). This blurring of spatial boundaries – where distant events feel proximate through media, affect, and imagination – recurred across accounts, with spatial boundaries of risk rendered porous through media circulations.
A dystopic local, immediate resonance of distal, even global risks was echoed by others, who likewise wove together micro- and macro-scales of risk. Patrick, for instance, refused to situate risk at a distance, instead perceiving a world where instability is ambient and imagined futures or scenarios of spatialised fear represent symbolic, temporal geographies: ‘What happens anywhere . . . I do worry about my kids . . . who knows if we could end up in a war . . . no one’s safe, are they?’ (interview, round 1). Beatrice reflected this anticipatory unease, foregrounding economic insecurity: ‘I worry about what it will be like in 20 years’ time when my kids are working . . . now, earning a decent wage doesn’t get you much, really . . . that’s why people can’t save, and they can’t own their own homes’ (interview, round 2). Here, precarity is both economic and existential, threatening not just safety, but the possibility of a ‘good life’, suggesting a ‘culture of fear’ has created diffuse anxiety (Furedi, 2002), with Georgina remarking, ‘You have to have anxiety to live in this world now’ (interview, round 1). These anxieties also resonate with wider contemporary uncertainties, including economic instability, housing precarity, and geopolitical tensions that shape parental imaginaries of children’s futures.
In contrast, some participants positioned the home and close-knit environments as protective spaces. Nathan said, ‘We sit in a garden; we play a lot of games . . . we’re quite happy to be at home’ (interview, round 1). Megan sought to protect her children from external risks: ‘I just feel like I don’t even want them going to after school clubs . . . you just don’t know’ (interview, round 2). While sociological research reminds us that harm to children often occurs within intimate or familiar environments rather than solely from external threats (Finkelhor, 2008), spatial distinctions – between home and public, familiar and foreign, routine and volatile, and near and far – operated as key reference points in participants’ constructions of risk. Yet this logic often faltered. Distal threats could feel acutely present through digital infrastructures and media saturation. These slippages marked a shift towards more entangled experiences of risk, shaped not only by proximity but also by post-digital realities where categories of ‘near’ and ‘far’ no longer held stable meaning. Many participants moved between categorical framings of risk, with their erosion signalling an emerging post-digital parental ambiguity. This juxtaposition between binary logics of online/offline and blurred, affective ambiguity of near/far suggests; while some framings offer a reassuring sense of control, others expose the limits of spatial reasoning in a post-digital world. The coexistence of these logics suggests parents navigate uncertainty through partial categorisations, even as their lived experience troubles the clarity those categories promise.
Post-digital ambiguity: temporal shifts, epistemic uncertainty, and entangled risks
While many participants framed risk through spatial and symbolic logics, post-digital parenting was characterised by affective, epistemic, and temporal ambiguities. Several accounts revealed slippages and contradictions that transcended binary distinctions such as online/offline and near/far, reflecting more entangled modes of meaning-making in which risk was experienced through atmospheres of confusion, anxiety, and partial control. Although digital spaces were positioned as inherently risky, some participants felt their children were safer when online within the physical and symbolic proximity of the home, compared to being offline in public or outdoor spaces, suggesting a reversal in the expected spatial logic of danger. This tension underscores the limitations of binary reasoning in post-digital life, where risk is not fixed but contextually defined and relationally felt.
For example, both Charly and Alex perceived their sons to be ‘safe’ due to a preference for online gaming at home, with Alex contrasting this with his daughter’s visits to the local park, which he found more concerning. Georgina assessed risk relationally, shaped by her children’s gender, sociability, temperament, and neurodivergence. She expressed concern about her daughter’s exposure to online sexual predators, noting, ‘She’s quiet in person to people, but online . . . she feels she can be whoever she wants’, while also worrying about her autistic son’s susceptibility to ‘gaming addiction’: ‘He gets obsessed with [his] PlayStation 5’ (interview, round 1). These accounts suggest perceptions of risk were shaped not only by the medium or space but also by children’s subjectivities and the affective registers through which safety and harm were interpreted. They also highlight gendered constructions of risk. Several participants framed girls as potential victims of sexual exploitation, while boys were depicted as vulnerable to corruption through gaming cultures or aggressive peer dynamics. These distinctions reflect long-standing gendered narratives within youth risk discourse (Bragg and Buckingham, 2013).
Proximity and digitality intersected with perceptions of children’s dispositions in ways that generated nuanced and sometimes contradictory evaluations of risk. Georgina, for example, expressed a preference for her daughter to meet romantic partners ‘face-to-face’ so she could verify their identity, yet also described a previous offline boyfriend as ‘toxic’ (interview, round 2), undermining the presumed safety of embodied, in-person encounters. She similarly framed mobile phones as both essential tools for safeguarding – ‘if kids have to travel far to school, then the parents might want to know if they’re . . . able to call them’ – and as potential vectors of online harm. These tensions illustrate how everyday parenting in post-digital contexts disrupts attempts at clarity in risk management. Rather than enabling definitive judgements, the interplay of proximity, digitality, and relational knowledge produced ambiguity in how participants located and responded to risk.
Several participants described online and offline risks as entangled and mutually reinforcing, challenging any neat separation between digital and physical domains. Megan, for example, believed online content shaped offline aggression: ‘There’s a lot of children that are actually influenced by, like, video games and dares . . . that’s why . . . they’re all stabbing each other’ (interview, round 3). When asked whether she feared the online or offline world more, she expressed ambivalence: ‘I’d be more nervous of them being outside if I’m honest, but again, the Internet does play a massive part in [offline risks]’. She suggested that online bravado spilled into real-life behaviour – ‘They almost take that with them by accident outside of the Internet’ – framing digital and physical risks as part of a shared moral and emotional terrain. While she viewed online abuse as psychologically corrosive – ‘it would probably break them down as a person’ – offline encounters were perceived as more immediate and unpredictable: ‘Is this going to turn into . . . [physical harm]; what have they got in their pocket?’ Patrick similarly situated digital harm within broader social dynamics, framing image-based abuse as a product of gendered peer pressure rather than technological affordances alone: ‘Girls being pressured by boys . . . to send pictures’ (interview, round 2). His account highlighted the relational production of harm, shaped by interpersonal norms, embodied contexts, and structural inequalities (Ringrose et al., 2025). Together, these accounts illustrate how parental imaginaries of risk are not anchored in medium or spatial location, but shaped by anticipated moral, emotional, and physical consequences of harm as it circulates across entangled digital and social worlds.
Temporal and epistemic ambiguities were also evident in participants’ evolving and sometimes contradictory understandings of digital risk. Several described a form of temporal switching, where earlier, more optimistic views of technology coexisted with more recent experiences that provoked anxiety, confusion, or distrust. Megan, for example, recounted a recent AI scam involving a deepfake that left her feeling personally implicated: ‘. . . This girl . . . all of a sudden, it wasn’t her. It was like an old man . . . deep fake and photoshopped . . . that’s scary because that’s how good AI is now’ (interview, round 3). Her sense of epistemic insecurity – ‘It nearly hit me and now it can happen again because it nearly just happened to me’ – illustrates how digital threats become emotionally proximate and blur distinctions between distant risk and immediate personal relevance.
Nathan similarly reflected, ‘We don’t know fact from fiction’ (interview, round 3), expressing concern about misinformation and the interpretive labour required to support children navigating a fragmented and unstable informational landscape – particularly younger children, who were positioned as lacking critical digital literacy (Setty et al., under review). These forms of disorientation align with Giddens’ (1991) notion of ontological insecurity, where trust in knowledge systems is undermined by accelerated technological change. Perceptions of risk were also shaped by generational orientation and experiential familiarity. Phillip, for instance, dismissed AI in gaming as benign – ‘it’s contained within the game . . . that’s been there since forever’ – but viewed chatbots as ‘dangerous’, recalling a story in which a chatbot ‘got someone to try and kill themselves’ (interview, round 1). Technologies that felt established or bounded were normalised, while newer, less comprehensible forms were rendered morally and emotionally hazardous. Together, these accounts suggest that digital risk is not static but fluid, shaped by personal encounters, shifting imaginaries and the temporal disjunctures of parenting in rapidly evolving digital environments.
These narratives illustrate a distinct post-digital condition: not just a collapse of spatial boundaries or reproduction of binary framings, but a deeper sense of epistemic, temporal and affective instability. While participants constructed and negotiated categorical logics, these logics appeared to unravel, producing ambivalence, anxiety, and a sense of partial control. Risk emerged as a diffuse and entangled presence, where hybrid threats are inseparable from broader uncertainties, in turn requiring risk management alongside an affective labour of care in contexts where knowledge, time, and trust are themselves unstable.
Mediation and management strategies: negotiating control, dialogue, and shared responsibility
Conceptual and spatial dynamics were closely tied to how participants mediated digital risks in everyday practice. Strategies ranged from restrictive control to open dialogue, reflecting varied attempts to manage children’s digital engagements amid perceived threats to well-being, development, and safety. While some approaches were grounded in a logic of clarity and control, others revealed ambivalence, contradiction, and uneven capacity across digital infrastructures and relational contexts.
Restrictive strategies were common. Participants described limiting device use, delaying smartphone access and monitoring online activity. Noleen and Daisy, for example, checked their children’s Internet histories, with Daisy claiming that her daughter is aware and accepting of this. These strategies were framed as protective but dependent on on-going communication and mutual understanding. Others adopted more unequivocal stances. HyeKyo, for instance, rejected negotiation altogether: ‘No social media at all for him . . . I don’t want to negotiate . . . it is detrimental to mental health, especially to teenagers. That is a fact’ (interview, round 2). Patrick similarly used age-restricted devices to delay exposure to social media, citing reputational risk: ‘Once it goes on the Internet . . . it’s there for life’ (interview, round 1). These accounts reflect a protective posture rooted in moral certainty, where fixed boundaries are prioritised over dialogue to pre-empt future harms.
Yet many participants acknowledged the limits of control-based approaches, particularly in the face of rapidly evolving digital environments. They described adopting more enabling strategies focused on trust, adaptation, and open communication. Demy, for instance, explained how her approach shifted as her daughter matured, becoming more discussion-based than directive. Alice, however, remained uneasy: while she sought to trust her daughter, she felt distanced from her digital life – ‘She’s probably on it [her phone] . . . it’s a dividing line, isn’t it?’ (interview, round 2) – expressing intergenerational dissonance and uncertainty over her own authority as a parent.
This ambivalence translated into calls from some participants for shared responsibility and support from other actors – schools, platforms, the state – in their efforts. Megan called for ‘an educational system [that is] useful and resourceful’ (interview, round 1), while Beatrice stressed the need for a curriculum responsive to children’s digital realities and supportive of parents: ‘The curriculum of the school isn’t . . . moving as quickly as the world is moving’ (interview, round 2). She described shielding herself from the online world’s darker aspects, relying on news media accounts to gauge risks: ‘When you hear about stuff that is happening . . . it makes you realise, wow, my child might end up like that one day . . . and that scares me’.
Several participants pointed to the limitations of parental control when set against powerful technological infrastructures. Phillip advocated prosecuting ‘trolls’ and imposing stricter moderation: ‘There aren’t enough parental controls . . . it has to be from the tech giants’ (interview, round 2). Patrick similarly expressed scepticism about parents’ ability to regulate alone: ‘You can’t be sat there minding what someone is doing 24/7 . . . we’ve all done stuff as kids that we didn’t want our parents to see’ (interview, round 3). He described a perceived asymmetry between parental responsibility and platform power: ‘There is zero trust that [tech companies] would [intervene] . . . All they’re interested in is growing their profits’. Ava offered a more nuanced reflection on distributed accountability: ‘It’s a village that raises a child’ (interview, round 3). While resisting a complete absolution of parents – ‘We have to hold some accountability’ – she noted that schools were under-resourced and tech companies prioritised profit over safety.
These accounts underscore the contradictory position of parents: morally implicated in keeping their children safe yet operating within systems that constrain their agency and capacity. This sense of constrained agency coexisted with internalised responsibility and guilt. Alice tried to understand her daughter’s online life – ‘I think I do anyway’ (interview, round 2) – while Patrick acknowledged his own contradictory behaviour: ‘I’ve just wasted half an hour looking at crap’ (interview, round 2). Megan described the emotional dilemma of wanting to shield her children from harm: ‘I wish I could lock them in their room and pretend life’s great, but I can’t do that’ (interview, round 1).
Despite expressing ambivalence about their own capacities, many participants were less forgiving of other parents’ practices. Patrick highlighted inconsistencies in parenting standards and expectations, while Alice critiqued screen overuse as a pacifying strategy: ‘Maybe if you interacted with them . . . they’d learn from you better than what are they learning from the Internet?’ (interview, round 3). She warned of long-term effects: ‘You’re breeding bad habits . . . they don’t actually think for themselves’. Megan linked such concerns to wider deficits in emotional and moral education, describing children as ‘left to their own devices’ (interview, round 1), with ‘devices’ operating both literally and metaphorically.
Together, participants’ accounts reveal a repertoire of parenting strategies shaped by experience, infrastructure, and persistent tensions in control, autonomy, and responsibility. While several mothers expressed emotional immediacy and affective labour, fathers too conveyed strong emotional investments, particularly when discussing regulation and institutional failure. These findings complicate assumptions about gendered parenting roles and show how both mothers and fathers engage in emotional labour, albeit through different discursive frames. Parenting in the post-digital era emerges not simply as a set of practices, but as a negotiation of systemic constraints, moral expectations, and affective demands.
Discussion
This paper has examined how parents conceptualise and navigate risk in their children’s post-digital lives. Many participants sought to make sense of risk through accessible binaries: online/offline, near/far, safe/dangerous. Yet these distinctions were unstable in practice, with accounts marked by contradiction, ambivalence, and epistemic uncertainty. Our findings extend post-digital scholarship by showing that risk is not a discrete or fixed object of concern, but a relational, affective, and symbolic construct, shaped at the intersection of digital infrastructures, parenting cultures, and socio-structural conditions.
Post-digital ambiguity – the collapse of online/offline distinctions – was a recurring theme. While several participants articulated clear dichotomies, their narratives revealed interpretive slippage and entanglement. This drift highlights the inadequacy of binary conceptualisations and underscores the experiential complexity of parenting in hybridised digital–physical environments. Spatial framings illustrate this further. While proximity sometimes signalled safety, local spaces could also be volatile or digitally saturated, while distant events – war, political unrest, viral media – could trigger immediate emotional responses. Risk imaginaries were shaped by symbolic geographies (Critcher, 2008), where ‘distance’ reflected not just spatial orientation but controllability, emotional salience, and affective resonance.
A further layer of uncertainty arose through digital epistemologies. Concerns about AI, deepfakes, and misinformation reflected not only fear about children’s exposure but a broader crisis of knowledge and trust. As Giddens (1991) suggests, late modernity is marked by the erosion of shared interpretive frameworks and the intensification of individual responsibility. For many participants, digital risk was not only a threat to safety but to knowing what is true, who to trust, and how to act.
Mediation strategies reflected these uncertainties. Participants described a range of practices – restrictive, enabling, communicative – but few adhered to a stable philosophy. For some, enabling mediation was aspirational but difficult amid fear, time constraints, and limited institutional support. Others adopted restrictive approaches while acknowledging their limits. As Livingstone and Blum-Ross (2020) and Helsper et al. (2024) argue, mediation is shaped not only by technical skill but by affective conditions, cultural scripts, and normative ideals of ‘good’ parenting. Many participants internalised responsibility while simultaneously expressing its insufficiency, mirroring critiques of neoliberal parenting cultures (Bragg and Buckingham, 2013), where parents are positioned as lone-risk managers amid systemic failure.
A defining feature of participants’ accounts was the asymmetry between responsibility and structural support. Their calls for greater action from schools, platforms, and governments were not an abdication of parental responsibility, but an appeal for more coordinated, collective infrastructure. Critiques of the curriculum and platform governance highlighted awareness that parenting now unfolds within broader systems that shape and amplify risk. Ava’s notion of the ‘village’ as a morally accountable but dispersed network captures this call for shared responsibility.
Theoretically, our findings challenge models of digital risk that rely on stable categories of harm and clearly bounded zones of responsibility. These models, reflected in policy and media discourse, fail to account for the interpretive and affective labour required to parent in unstable digital environments. Our participants navigated not only technological change but deeper ontological insecurity, a destabilisation of the frameworks that render daily life intelligible (Giddens, 1991). Uncertainty was not just cognitive but emotional and moral, expressed through fear, guilt, hope, and protective impulse.
In this sense, the digital was not merely a technological sphere but a symbolic terrain onto which broader anxieties about childhood, parenting, and social change were projected. As Ringrose et al. (2024, 2025) argue, post-digital risks emerge from the interplay between technological affordances, embodied subjectivities, and affective intensities. Our participants’ concerns – about, for instance, AI, grooming, reputational harm – were entangled with wider anxieties about violence, social decay, and parental failure. Risk cannot, therefore, be reduced to ‘exposure’ or ‘behaviour’; it is constituted through intersectional inequalities, relational dynamics, and socio-technical imaginaries.
The digital thus emerged both as a routine part of everyday life and an overdetermined moral object. It concentrated broader parental anxieties about conditions of contemporary childhood and parenting (Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020). Our findings thus contribute to scholarship that situates digital parenting within wider systems of meaning, power, and affect. Rather than depicting parents as digitally naïve or overly anxious, we show how their ambivalence is contextually grounded and affectively charged. Post-digital parenting involves navigating hybrid, relational risks without clear maps, where even the binaries used to make sense of risk become ambivalent tools of emotional and moral management.
This complexity challenges dominant models of digital governance, which tends to isolate specific risks and assign discrete responsibilities. Our findings support ecological approaches (Livingstone et al., 2018; Phippen, 2025), which foreground the multi-scalar, culturally situated and relational nature of risk perception and response. We argue that education and policy must move beyond control-oriented frameworks to address the infrastructural and emotional realities of post-digital parenting. Recognising parents as situated actors and co-navigators – rather than simply gatekeepers – offers a more responsive and supportive framework for addressing risk in digitally saturated family life.
Conclusion
Our study contributes to critiques of binary and individualised approaches to online safety. Parents are navigating a world far more complex, uncertain, and hybrid than such frameworks allow. Their meaning-making is shaped not just by technology but by relational, symbolic, and structural dynamics. Interventions must therefore go beyond technical advice or moral imperatives. They must address the emotional labour of parenting, the contextual specificity of risk, and the broader systems within which parenting takes place. By grounding our analysis in parents’ voices, we advance a situated, post-digital account of contemporary parenting and highlight the need for education, policy, and safeguarding to adopt relational and reflective approaches that acknowledge complexity, ambivalence, and interdependence.
This study reflects participants’ narratives and diary reflections rather than direct observation of family practices. However, the longitudinal design and the inclusion of a WhatsApp diary component enabled us to capture both reflective accounts and more contemporaneous responses to media encounters and parenting experiences. These methods offered insight into how parental understandings of digital risk emerge and evolve over time and in relation to everyday events. Future research could build on this approach by incorporating children’s perspectives or ethnographic observation of family life to examine more directly how parental understandings of digital risk are negotiated in everyday interaction.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by Leverhulme Trust [RPG-2023-002].
Ethics statement
The study underwent ethical review at the University of Surrey [FASS 23-24 018 EGA], ensuring peer-reviewed scrutiny of protocols, recruitment processes, and data handling. All participants provided informed consent to participate in the study.
Data availability
Anonymised data available on request.