Is My Child Normal? Sciency Discourses in Online Parenting Advice Cultures

For some decades, scholars have documented the expansion of discourses of ‘intensive’ parenting in Anglo-American culture and the increasing mediation of family life. In this context, this article argues that online culture is increasingly responsible for an ever-present instructional address, in which parents are continually targeted with advice from many voices, automated, known and unknown, all claiming various kinds of expertise about how to parent ‘well’ for a child’s development. We offer a framework for understanding how online parenting cultures contribute to intensive parenting through the paradigm of what we term ‘sciency’ advice: that is, advice that relies on the aesthetic and affective authority of science and scientific credentials. Examining three intertwined circuits of sciency advice through which parents are addressed: in the algorithmic pushes of social media content, in mediated zones of sociality such as group chats, and in parenting platforms and apps, we suggest these discourses are activated both in the purportedly helpful ‘push’ of social media and the anxious ‘pull’ of information-seeking practices of parents. As such, ‘sciency’ advice is bounded neither spatially nor temporally to particular sites or schedules; it is continuous and environmental. In proposing this framework of analysis, we suggest that these ‘360-degree’ online parenting cultures redefine the ‘parent’ as a subject and object of advice, heightening the stakes of everyday childrearing.