Abstract
This study examines how parents in England interpret and respond to environmental and climate news, and how these engagements shape emotional experiences and everyday parenting practices. Using a longitudinal qualitative design utilising semi-structured interviews and WhatsApp diaries, the paper explores how parents negotiate environmental news within broader emotional climates marked by anxiety, uncertainty, and constrained agency. While participants widely recognised climate change as urgent and morally significant, reporting that was abstract, episodic, or sensationalised often felt distant, overwhelming, and difficult to translate into meaningful action. Parents were more responsive to local and solution-oriented forms of reporting that enabled tangible forms of care, agency, and role-modelling within family life. Engagement with environmental news was shaped by parents' dual role as both individuals and caregivers responsible for children's futures, producing ongoing forms of emotion work and emotional reflexivity through which participants negotiated tensions between responsibility, concern, and limited feelings of control. The findings contribute to the sociology of emotions by showing how climate-related anxieties are socially mediated through parental identities, moral expectations, and everyday practices. The paper concludes by arguing for more sustained, locally relevant, and actionable forms of environmental reporting capable of fostering meaningful public engagement with climate and environmental issues.