Manage your emotions! Encouraging parents to engage in introspective analysis and help seeking

In the Danish context, a more recent risk-preventive parent-child policy agenda has paved the way for an emotionally normative model of parenting support, emphasising parents’ mentalisation capabilities, attachment patterns and emotional self-regulation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article examines how frontline workers in Danish health visitor services have not only adopted this agenda but also actively reshaped and extended it beyond its original scope. We explore how emotional (dis)orientation in parents is targeted to foster more affectionate and balanced parent-child interactions. This reflects an expanded understanding of risk, one that assumes parents must acknowledge and manage unresolved emotional experiences, whether past or present, to prevent negative impacts on their child’s future opportunities. It also illustrates an institutional framing of parenting as a self-help project, where therapeutic intervention is disguised as educational guidance. The article contributes to an understanding of how the current therapy culture shapes contemporary parenting interventions, where emotional attunement is framed not only as an important-virtue in parents but also as a moral obligation – and, thus, as a marker of responsible citizenship – in today’s parenting culture. This shift risks pathologising ordinary emotional struggles. It reinforces a cultural logic in which parents are expected not only to identify and correct their perceived shortcomings but also to seek support to secure success in their parenting efforts.