Narratives of crisis: raising children in digital times

This chapter focuses on the narratives that shape popular and professional understandings of the current crisis of childhood exacerbated by the promises and perils of digital technology, as found in current academic literature and advice for parents. By situating the parent-child relationship within a shift in which upbringing is recast as 'parenting', we draw attention to what these narratives leave out of the picture of what it means to raise children. We highlight an approach to the study of raising children and the parent-child relationship that attends to the particularity of the way in which digital technologies mediate, and are constitutive of, the parent-child relationship today and of the kind of judgement this entails. By doing so, a different sense of crisis emerges.