"Yes, your fears are correct. He is disturbed, whether it's diagnosable or not:" risk discourse in parenting guides

Abstract

Parenting guides are illustrative of the current ethos of parenting and provide a rich site of examination due to the intersecting discourses that shape knowledge regarding ‘proper’ parenting. In this thesis, I offer a discourse analysis on the parenting guides Yes, Your Teen is Crazy (2003) by Michael Bradley, Brainstorm (2013) by Daniel Siegel, and the parenting website Empowering Parents in order to illuminate how discourses of risk (re)produce and naturalize assumptions of parenting and adolescence. I contend that each text utilizes risk to define adolescents as an inherent threat to themselves and their communities if left unchecked and situates parents as the shepherds for adolescence, shepherds who are subject to responsibility and blame. Both adolescence and parenting are produced as objects of expert knowledge that position adulthood as the normative foil to adolescence.