Reporting the Riots: Parenting Culture and the Problem of Authority in Media Analysis of August 2011

This article reviews the results of a small study of the national British newspapers in the period immediately following the 2011 riots, which analyses the ways in which political and media discourse linked the riots to the problem of ‘parenting’. It examines three discourses that arise from this linkage: (a) a generalised ‘moral collapse’; (b) the specific problem of ‘troubled families’; and (c) parenting policy and the problem of discipline. From this, I propose there is a fourth, ‘missing discourse’, which would situate the problem of parental authority within a wider crisis of adult authority. Drawing on historical and sociological reflections on the problem of parental authority in the late modern period, I propose that a more fruitful discussion would take account of the ways in which parenting culture and policy has challenged assumptions about generational responsibility.