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.
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