The post-pandemic image of the child in British media discourse (a case study of The Guardian)

The aim of this research is to broaden the understanding of the linguistic picture of the post-pandemic world, as represented in media texts, by modeling the image of the post-COVID child conveyed in British media publications. The article presents the results of a content analysis of 46 articles from The Guardian newspaper, covering the period from January 2023 to December 2024, which focus on issues related to child-rearing and education. It has been determined that the media image of the child is represented by the following key topics: "attendance", "behavior", "age-related expectations", "mental health", "learning loss", and "special needs". The structure of the media discourse under consideration has been established, identifying the following sub-discourses: parental, pedagogical, child, journalistic, legal, statistical, and the discourse of power, including political, which differ in the degree to which the identified topics are represented within them. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first to reconstruct the image of the post-pandemic child in British media as an interdiscursive phenomenon arising at the intersection of the specified sub-discourses.