ABSTRACT
The author concerns social reproduction, precious parenting and what she calls banal terrorism, to argue that the contemporary security state and the reign of trumped-up paranoia. It engenders have not simply altered the spaces and material social practices of contemporary childhood but have fed into a burgeoning regime of surveillance. The household mirrors the practices of the state while softening its future subjects for what the Bush spin-meisters might call Operation Enduring Watchfulness. The amplified fear along with the moral panics with which it is associated provide ready means of distraction from the political economic, social, environmental and personal problems that face families of children coming of age in the US at present. The regime of parental hypervigilance has much in common with that of the homeland security state. In the name of fear the public environment is monitored, bunkered and conspicuously patrolled while the home is increasingly fortressed.
