Parenting Beyond Doing: Care, Normativity, and Inequality in Contemporary Family Life

Parenting research and policy increasingly emphasize visible practices, measurable outcomes, and parental effort as indicators of competence. Across welfare, education, and family intervention contexts, “good parenting” is often evaluated through intensive doing: monitoring, documenting, optimizing development, and managing risk. While these frameworks foreground parental responsibility, they frequently obscure the relational dimensions of care and intensify existing classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities. Building on feminist scholarship that has long conceptualized parenting as relational, ethical, and socially situated, this paper develops a theoretical framework for rethinking parenting by integrating family studies scholarship on intensive parenting, emotional labor, and inequality with Hannah Arendt’s distinctions among labor, work, and action. Parenting is commonly framed as labor, the daily work of sustaining children’s lives, or as work, the longer-term project of producing competent future adults. Drawing on Arendt’s concept of action, the paper reinterprets parenting as a relational practice grounded in presence, responsiveness, and mutual recognition. Using illustrative examples from diverse family contexts, including Indigenous and immigrant communities, the analysis shows how privatized and performance-oriented models of care place strain on families while rendering collective forms of support less visible. The paper concludes by outlining implications for family research and policy, including a shift from outcome-based evaluation toward relational engagement and from individualized responsibility toward strengthened social infrastructures of care, arguing for greater attention to relational care, shared responsibility, and the structural conditions that shape parenting practices and family well-being.