Parental responsibility is a topic much discussed in present-day Finnish society. Teachers, parents, child welfare professionals, daycare personnel, enter discussions on parental responsibility in media, parent-teacher meetings, even on bus-stops as well as less public places. Responsibility seems to be a key concept in policy and public debate about the lives of children and parents. But what is responsibility? Who is responsible? Our aim is to deconstruct parental responsibility and investigate into the meanings it has in different contexts. The findings reported are the results of analyses using newspaper articles and parents' interviews as data. One of the mechanisms which plays a role in discussions on parental responsibility is the process of individualisation. Individualisation is a term used by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (e.g. 2002) in their analysis focussing on the contemporary ways of life (Zeitdiagnose). On the one hand, individualisation means the disintegration of previous social forms, like family, on the one hand it means new demands, controls and constraints are imposed on the individual. The individual is forced to make decisions concerning his or her life and consequently the way the individual's life will run is thought to be his or her choice. Thus the individual is held responsible for his or her success in life (e.g. Beck & Bech-Gernsheim 2002). The consequences of the individualisation for parental responsibility can be various. Does individualisation lead to increased selfishness and abandoning the parental responsibilities? Or are parents increasingly responsibilised for the care and upbringing of children and the youth (see e.g. Kelly)? In this research we study parental responsibility as socially constructed. According to social constructionism people make sense of their everyday world informed by their social and cultural context (see e.g. Berger & Luckmann 1994; Gergen & Gergen 1991; Gubrium & Holstein 1990.) This implies that we see our informants as co-creating their meanings of parental responsibility within their social and cultural context. The methodological approach in the study is qualitative. We report the results of qualitative thematising in which we also paid some attention to the words used in the texts. We focussed on the meanings themselves and occasionally on the ways in which meanings were produced. The analysis of newspaper articles produced dimensions of parental responsibility which were used as the bases of parents' interviews. Through the analyses of the newspaper articles the dimensions of beginning, obligating and diminishing parental responsibility emerged. These dimensions describe the dynamics of the parental responsibility and construct various meanings for parental responsibility, for instance responsibility of choices, moral responsibility, absolute (normative) caring responsibility and shared responsibility. Our preliminary analysis also indicates that responsible parenting seems to have an 'ought to', a set of desired norms for evaluating parents' behaviour. The term conveys a moral meaning (right and wrong) because it suggests that some parents could be judged as 'irresponsible'. Responsibilities could also be seen as relational: normative, absolute responsibility interweaves with individual responsibility, in other words responsibilities complement one another (Such & Walker 2004).