Accidents waiting to happen: news coverage of children’s health and safety in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

This article builds on an ongoing investigation of social constructions of childhood during the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century, and attempts to historicise and contextualise the discursive change that participated in the making of a specific version of intensive parenting culture in Turkey. The research is based on a critical discourse analysis of the news coverage of children’s physical wellbeing in Hürriyet newspaper. It is argued that as these news articles gradually changed their answer to the question of who should be responsible for children’s wellbeing, the newspaper began to invest more time and resources on the twin images of the ‘intensive parent’ and the ‘vulnerable child’, and turned its gaze away from the social and the systemic, and consequently, away from certain groups of ‘less precious’ children.