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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2025
In this chapter, I pay attention to parents’ engagement with the world in which they are raising children – a world often apparently replete with crises, risks and much fodder for anxiety. In a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, colleagues and I will be exploring these themes in a longitudinal framework, but this book gave me the chance to listen to parents’ understandings and negotiations of recommended news, and their thoughts about the worlds their children are growing up in. Freddie, father of a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old living in Greater London, spoke to me about his hopes and fears about the world in which he is raising his children. He said it was a case of the news about the world finding him, rather than him finding the news (Toff and Nielsen, 2018; Swart, 2021; Lehaff, 2022). Freddie prompted me to ask early on in this work, in what ways parents interfaced with algorithms in finding out about the world in which they raise their children. I was curious about the entanglement of parents’ contexts, parenting cultures and decisions and choices, with algorithmic shaping, filtering, and the curation of news about the world, as they sought it out, or indeed, as Freddie says, stumbled upon it. Relevant to Freddie's expression about the news finding him – the scholarship on selective exposure and algorithmic news creation encourages us to think about attracting the news (Thorson, 2020). Here, we need to think in terms of who attracts what kinds of news on social media and who does not, thereby reframing our thinking from focusing on incidental (Boczkowski et al, 2018) or accidental exposure to news to thinking about the complex ways in which platforms wield power in terms of what kind of news finds which user and why.
In this chapter, I consider how my conversations with parents about the news recommended to them, shored up a wide variety of circumstances and factors in parenting journeys, parenting contexts, and wider parenting cultures. These remain entangled, I found, with the ways in which parents interfaced and engaged with news about the world.
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