DOI: 10.26466/opusjsr.2011131 ISSN: 2791-9781

In pursuit of the perfect parent: Parenting narratives in digital therapeutic culture

Yunus Ergen
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With the spread of digital culture, parenting has become a discursive field in which expert knowledge circulates rapidly and motherhood and fatherhood are redefined. This study critically examines how digital parenting narratives are constructed through therapeutic culture and the norms, responsibilities, and forms of authority that produce desirable parenting. Accordingly, the Bir Aile Meselesi YouTube channel was designated as the case for a qualitative case study, and the spoken narratives of three parenting-focused episodes were analyzed thematically. The findings reveal a powerful narrative that constructs the child as a unique subject to be understood and the parent as responsible for interpreting the emotional needs underlying the behavior and regulating the relational climate. While compassion, connection, healthy communication, and self-reflexivity offer transformative alternatives to punitive approaches, they also transform parenting into an ongoing project of self-improvement. Although structural problems surrounding parenting are often reduced to matters of individual awareness and inner balance, clinical experience, personal narrative, vulnerability, and discursive appeals to audience participation are mobilized as resources through which speakers claim legitimacy for the channel’s therapeutic authority. Ultimately, through a call to abandon perfection, parenting is reframed around a new normative ideal: the “therapeutically competent parent.”

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