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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Parenting has long been regarded as one of the most significant yet elusive human practices. In contemporary Western societies, it stands at the crossroads of private duty and public concern, personal intimacy and social mandate. Over recent decades, academic research, public policy, and media discourse have converged around an increasingly individualized ideal of “competent” or “intensive” parenting (Faircloth 2014; Hays 1996; Lee et al. 2014). Within this framework, to be a “good” parent is to be ever attentive, emotionally responsive, and continuously engaged in optimizing a child’s development, often through sustained investments of time, money, and energy aimed at securing a successful future. Parenting is thus framed as a repertoire of visible actions, skills, and techniques expected to generate predictable outcomes, most notably children who are healthy, happy, and well adjusted.

This outcome-driven model has come to dominate not only popular culture but also social policy and professional practice. Parenting programs, parent training initiatives, and state interventions frequently operate on the assumption that children’s outcomes can be traced directly to parental behavior. When a child falters, academically, emotionally, or socially, attention turns to the parents, to their discipline practices, emotional attunement, availability, and cognitive stimulation (Gillies et al. 2017; Wall 2010). Within this paradigm, parenting is rendered legible primarily through what parents do, while the being of parenting, understood as its existential, relational, and political dimension, remains largely unexamined. This emphasis on doing also functions as a mechanism of regulation, positioning parents as individually accountable for conditions shaped by broader social and economic forces. As a result, caregiving practices are subjected to differential moral scrutiny, structured through gendered, racialized, and classed expectations that shape who is recognized as a “good” parent and how care is evaluated. These dynamics have become central concerns in family studies, where parenting practices are increasingly examined through frameworks of competence, investment, and responsibility.

Feminist maternal scholarship has long challenged the reduction of parenting to tasks, outcomes, or technical competence, emphasizing instead its ethical, relational, and political dimensions (O’Reilly 2016; Rich 2021; Ruddick 1995). Across this body of work, parenting is understood as a form of practice grounded in care, interdependence, and moral judgment, rather than as a neutral set of behaviors or skills. Building on these insights, this paper does not introduce relational or ethical accounts of parenting as new, but seeks to extend them by bringing them into dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work, and action.

Recent feminist maternal scholarship has further developed these insights by examining parenting in relation to neoliberal governance, racialized surveillance, precarity, and shifting family forms (Collins 2020; Elliott et al. 2015; Ennis 2014; O’Reilly 2021). This work emphasizes that parenting is embedded within dynamic institutional and political contexts, while continuing to foreground care as relational, socially situated, and unequally structured. Engaging with these contemporary debates, the present paper contributes by bringing this body of work into dialogue with Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work, and action, offering a conceptual framework for clarifying how care is simultaneously sustained, evaluated, and lived as relational presence.

This paper proposes a shift in perspective. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Arendt 1958), it argues that parenting should not be understood solely in terms of labor or work, as tasks performed or outcomes achieved, but also as action, a relational mode of being with others through which identity is disclosed and meaning emerges. Arendt’s distinction between labor, work, and action has long informed political theory by clarifying differences among activities that sustain life, build durable worlds, and reveal who we are in relation to others (Arendt 1958; Benhabib 1996). Yet these categories have rarely been applied to parenting, a practice that moves fluidly among all three but is commonly reduced to the first two. By placing Arendt in conversation with feminist and sociological scholarship on care and inequality, the paper develops a framework that clarifies how parenting is simultaneously shaped by necessity, oriented toward future-making, and enacted as a relational practice through which norms and identities are lived and negotiated. This approach does not position relational understandings of parenting as new, but rather uses Arendt’s conceptual framework to clarify how such relationality can be understood as a form of action, disclosure, and presence within contemporary conditions of governance and evaluation.

Parenting as labor involves the cyclical and necessary acts of caregiving, including feeding, cleaning, protecting, and soothing. Parenting as work encompasses the longer-term project of shaping children as future participants in the social world through education, discipline, and cultural transmission. These dimensions are widely recognized and frequently examined. What tends to remain obscured is parenting as action, the relational and disclosive sphere in which parents reveal who they are, how they inhabit norms, and how they enact care as a way of being. In this sphere, parenting exceeds the paradigm of task performance and becomes a form of existence that is ethical, political, and potentially transformative. Attending to this dimension foregrounds the exposure involved in care, the ways caregivers appear before others, and the ethical weight carried by presence rather than performance within socially structured fields of judgment and evaluation.

The critical edge of this inquiry lies in examining the normative assumptions that govern what counts as “good” parenting. Contemporary models rest on individualized and privatized ideals that equate competence with visible intensity and measurable success. Such normativity is sustained by social, cultural, and economic privilege and by the presumption that parental effort should yield proportionate child outcomes. Parenting is cast as a series of techniques to be executed and results to be evaluated, reconfiguring care as a form of labor rather than a mode of relation and locating responsibility for social well-being at the level of the individual family.

By questioning this framework, the paper opens a conceptual space for an alternative understanding of parenting as both being and collective care. Rather than a private obligation to perform tasks efficiently, parenting is reconceived as a relational and communal practice that discloses human interdependence. It is not reducible to inputs and outputs but grounded in presence, recognition, and dignity. From this perspective, parenting becomes a site where the privatization and commodification of care can be resisted, and where responsibility for sustaining life is understood as shared rather than individualized. What comes into view is a form of care whose significance lies less in what it produces than in how it sustains relations across time, difference, and vulnerability within unequal social conditions.

Arendt’s categories are especially illuminating for this task because they distinguish between what sustains life, what fabricates durability, and what constitutes political existence. When parenting is confined to labor and work, it is interpreted only as a necessity and production. When understood as action, it can be reimagined as a political and existential practice that reveals who we are in relation to others and that challenges outcome-oriented regimes of evaluation that dominate contemporary governance.

Recent feminist readings of Arendt have emphasized the political and relational dimensions of natality as distinct from biological reproduction (Söderbäck 2018). This paper extends that feminist dialogue into the field of parenting, where care is increasingly codified as measurable labor and privatized responsibility. While natality gestures toward the human capacity for beginning, parenting makes visible how that capacity is governed, disciplined, and normalized within contemporary social orders. By shifting analytic attention from care as ontological potential to parenting as lived and political practice, the paper shows how Arendt’s notion of action can reorient understandings of parenting toward presence, relation, and collective being rather than reproductive or instrumental doing.

Conceptually, the paper repositions Arendt’s framework within a domain she largely excluded, the household, and engages feminist critiques of her sharp separation between the private and the political (Dietz 2002; Honig 1995). In contemporary societies, the household is already deeply politicized, and parenting functions as a central site of moral evaluation and social regulation through law, policy, professional expertise, and cultural norms. Normatively, the paper challenges intensive and individualized parenting ideals and proposes parenting as being, understood as relational, collective, and restorative.

The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section revisits Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work, and action and considers their relevance to parenting practices. The second examines how discourses of competence and intensity collapse parenting into labor and work, reinforcing privatized and outcome-oriented norms. The third develops the concept of parenting as being, drawing on Arendt’s account of action as disclosure and on contemporary theories of relationality and care. The fourth explores implications for policy and practice, arguing for parenting models that are socially supported and collectively sustained rather than individually evaluated. The final section reflects on the broader implications of bringing Arendt into dialogue with parenting, suggesting that doing so not only deepens understandings of parenting but also enriches accounts of the human condition.

This project does not idealize parenting or minimize its challenges. Rather, it recognizes that parenting encompasses labor, work, and action, and emphasizes that the latter must be brought into view to resist the reduction in care to privatized performance. By reconceptualizing parenting as being, the paper invites scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to reconsider the normative foundations of care. Parenting as being is not defined by measurable intensity but by presence, recognition, and relation, affirming parenting as a shared social and political endeavor rather than an individualized test of competence.

2. Arendt’s Distinctions: Labor, Work, and Action

In The Human Condition (Arendt 1958), Hannah Arendt distinguishes between three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. These are not simply classificatory but ontological distinctions, revealing different dimensions of the human condition and the varied ways human beings inhabit the world. Each corresponds to a distinct relation to necessity, durability, and plurality. Although Arendt developed these distinctions in response to the crises of the mid-twentieth century, including the rise in mass society, technological expansion, and the erosion of political life, they remain instructive for understanding contemporary practices of care and family life. Their continued relevance lies not only in their conceptual clarity but in their capacity to illuminate ordinary practices whose political significance often goes unrecognized within prevailing regimes of social organization.

Parenting, though absent from Arendt’s explicit analysis, is implicated in all three activities. The sustaining and repetitive acts of caregiving resonate with her account of labor as cyclical and bound to necessity. The longer-term work of shaping children as durable social beings parallels her understanding of work as world-building. The relational and expressive dimensions of parenting, through which parents disclose who they are in and through care, align closely with her concept of action. Yet Arendt herself relegated family life and caregiving to the private sphere, treating them as largely outside the political realm. Feminist theorists have long challenged this exclusion, and it is here that parenting becomes a particularly generative site for reinterpreting Arendt’s distinctions. This move builds on feminist maternal scholarship that has already foregrounded care as relational, ethical, and political (O’Reilly 2016; Rich 2021; Ruddick 1995), and extends it by offering a conceptual vocabulary that differentiates between sustaining, producing, and relational dimensions of parenting practice. Attending to parenting draws attention to forms of activity that are ubiquitous and indispensable yet routinely rendered conceptually marginal, in part because they unfold within intimate settings that are nonetheless shaped by power, inequality, and moral evaluation.

2.1. Labor: Necessity and the Cycles of Life

Arendt defines labor as the activity bound to biological necessity: “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor” (Arendt 1958, p. 7). Labor sustains life but produces nothing that endures beyond its immediate consumption. It is cyclical, repetitive, and absorbed into the ongoing processes of living. Historically, Arendt situates labor within the household, the oikos, the private domain of ancient Greek life, where survival was maintained, most often by women and enslaved people. This division enabled men to enter the polis, the public sphere of speech and action. Freedom, she writes, “began where the labor of the body ceased” (Arendt 1958, p. 30). The household, indispensable yet unfree, was governed by necessity.

Parenting resonates strongly with this category. Much of parenting consists of sustaining and cyclical acts such as feeding, cleaning, soothing, and restoring order. These everyday gestures exemplify what Arendt describes as the “endless, monotonous cycle of the life process” (Arendt 1958, p. 96). Labor does not culminate in completion because life itself must be continuously maintained. Parenting is understood as labor, thus naming a primary form of care that is both necessary and ongoing, and its gendered distribution continues to mirror the private and public divide Arendt described. Seen up close, this labor is not an abstract biological function, but an embodied practice carried out through attentiveness, fatigue, and persistence over time, often under unequal conditions of social recognition and institutional support.

Arendt’s framing, however, invites critique. By confining labor to necessity and assigning it to the private sphere, she risks devaluing the forms of work through which life is sustained. Elshtain (1981) and Pateman (1988) argue that the classical separation between oikos and polis reproduces the marginalization of reproductive labor. Benhabib (1996) similarly contends that excluding the private from political analysis obscures how power and inequality operate within families themselves. More recent feminist and political economic scholarship has pushed this critique further, emphasizing that reproductive, domestic, and affective labor constitute the infrastructure of capitalist and political life rather than its backdrop (Federici 2012; Fraser 2016; Bhattacharya 2017; Weeks 2011).

From this perspective, parenting as labor should not be dismissed as unpolitical but recognized as central to the social reproduction of both life and inequality. Feminist analyses of care have further shown that this labor is differentially distributed and evaluated across gendered, racialized, and classed lines, shaping whose caregiving is recognized, supported, or scrutinized. The privatization and feminization of care work continue to sustain neoliberal economies that depend on unpaid or underpaid domestic labor (Fraser 2022; Tronto 1993). Understanding parenting through this lens brings its dual character into sharper focus. Parenting is at once an intimate, life-sustaining practice and a site of political struggle over value, dependency, and justice within contemporary economies of care.

2.2. Work: Durability and World-Building

If labor sustains life, work builds the world. Arendt defines work as “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence… work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings” (Arendt 1958, p. 7). Through work, humans fabricate durable objects, institutions, and structures that outlast their creators. Unlike labor, which is consumed in the ongoing processes of life, work leaves behind artifacts that stabilize human existence across time. Work is thus oriented toward durability and permanence, toward the creation of a world that can be shared with others.

Education stands among Arendt’s clearest examples of work. In The Crisis in Education (Arendt 1961), she argues that adults bear responsibility for introducing children to an existing world, preserving what is valuable while making room for renewal. “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it,” she writes (Arendt 1961, p. 196). Parenting can also be understood as work in this sense, as an activity oriented toward shaping conditions of continuity, preparing children to inhabit and carry forward a shared world. Parents, like educators, mediate between the child’s newness and the world’s relative permanence. This mediating role places parents in a position of responsibility that is future-oriented yet enacted in the present, and increasingly shaped by normative expectations of success, achievement, and proper development.

This analogy, however, exposes an important tension. Work implies design, control, and purposiveness, qualities that, when extended to parenting, can transform care into a project of optimization. Children risk being approached as outcomes to be perfected rather than persons to be encountered. The contemporary logic of intensive parenting exemplifies this shift, as children’s lives become increasingly scheduled, measured, and managed in the name of maximizing potential (Faircloth 2014). Parenting is reframed as work in a narrow productive sense, a task to be executed and evaluated, rather than a relationship to be inhabited over time. Scholars such as Canovan (1992) and Pitkin (1998) have noted that Arendt’s category of work privileges intention and stability, often at the expense of unpredictability and spontaneity. In parenting, this tendency surfaces in efforts to control, anticipate, and quantify children’s trajectories, especially within institutional contexts that reward measurable success. Conceiving parenting primarily as work thus risks reinforcing a production-oriented logic, positioning the child as an artifact and the parent as a builder whose moral worth is assessed through outcomes.

Read alongside feminist critiques of developmentalism and intensive parenting, this tendency reflects broader pressures to align care with productivity, evaluation, and future-oriented success, reinforcing the translation of relational practices into measurable outputs. The Arendtian distinction helps clarify this shift, not by replacing existing critiques, but by distinguishing analytically between sustaining life, building futures, and inhabiting relationships.

2.3. Action: Plurality, Disclosure, and Freedom

For Arendt, action represents the most distinctively human activity. It corresponds to plurality, the condition that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt 1958, p. 7). Unlike labor or work, action neither sustains biological life nor produces tangible objects. It occurs when individuals disclose who they are through word and deed in the presence of others. Action is irreducibly relational and inherently unpredictable. It introduces new beginnings into a shared world shaped by the presence of others. “With word and deed,” Arendt writes, “we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth… it is in action and speech, in the beginning of something new, that we appear as distinct, unique individuals” (Arendt 1958, p. 176).

Identity, in this account, is revealed not as an inner essence but through appearance, through being with others. Viewed in this light, parenting cannot be reduced to a fixed set of obligations or a project of formation alone. Parenting also unfolds as a relational practice through which identity is disclosed over time. Parents reveal who they are in how they care, how they inhabit norms, and how they appear in relation to children, institutions, and communities. Parenting as action does not aim at producing particular outcomes, but at sustaining presence within the shared spaces of care. Its significance lies in relation rather than result, in responsiveness rather than mastery, especially under conditions of heightened social visibility and moral judgment.

While this relational understanding of parenting has been extensively developed within feminist maternal scholarship (O’Reilly 2016; Ruddick 1995), Arendt’s concept of action offers a way to specify how such relationality operates as a form of disclosure, through which parents appear to others and to themselves in the ongoing enactment of care. This allows parenting to be understood not only as ethical or relational, but as a mode of being that unfolds through plurality, contingency, and exposure.

This dimension of parenting has often been overlooked in part because Arendt located action within the public sphere. Feminist critics such as Honig (1995) and Dietz (2002), however, have argued that the private sphere is already saturated with power and political meaning. Parenting as action makes visible the porous boundary between oikos and polis. When parenting is framed primarily as labor, governed by necessity, or as work, oriented toward production, it becomes locked into cycles of doing and evaluation. When recognized as action, parenting emerges as a mode of being, one that affirms plurality, discloses identity, and resists reduction to the measurable outcomes that dominate contemporary regimes of assessment.

This reframing does not replace existing feminist analyses of care, but clarifies how parenting can be understood as a site where relational practice becomes publicly meaningful, subject to recognition, evaluation, and inequality. In this sense, parenting as action draws attention to the conditions under which caregivers are seen, judged, and valued, revealing how relational presence itself is structured by broader social hierarchies.

2.4. Natality as the Ground of Action

Among Arendt’s most generative insights is her insistence that action is grounded in natality. Whereas mortality frames human finitude, natality affirms the capacity to begin anew. “The miracle that saves the world… is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted” (Arendt 1958, p. 247). Natality is not confined to biological birth but names an existential condition of newness, the ongoing human capacity to initiate beginnings. Every child embodies this potential for renewal, opening an unpredictable future. In this sense, natality binds parenting directly to action. The birth of a child is not only a biological event but a political and existential affirmation of human freedom and transformation. It confronts caregivers with the responsibility of welcoming what cannot be fully anticipated or secured within existing social orders.

Yet Arendt leaves unresolved a central tension. She celebrates natality as the foundation of action while excluding birth and care from the political realm. Feminist scholars such as Cavarero (2000) and Benhabib (1996) have long underscored this paradox. More recent thinkers extend this critique by arguing that natality cannot be separated from dependency, vulnerability, and the sustaining relations that make new beginnings possible (Birmingham 2006; Butler 2015; Honig 2009, 2017). Arendt honors the fact of beginning but marginalizes the labor and relations through which beginnings are sustained. Parenting thus occupies the space her distinctions leave open. It joins the necessity of labor with the promise of natality. Through parenting, the act of beginning is inseparable from the ongoing work of care and from the social conditions that enable or constrain it, revealing the relational foundations of political life.

Feminist maternal scholarship further reinforces this point by emphasizing that beginnings are always sustained within ongoing relations of care, dependency, and social support (Ruddick 1995). Bringing these perspectives together allows natality to be understood not only as a moment of origin, but as an ongoing relational condition that is lived and maintained through parenting practices.

2.5. Education as Mediating Labor, Work, and Action

The Crisis in Education (Arendt 1961) offers a bridge between Arendt’s categories and the sphere of care. Education, Arendt argues, is not oriented toward producing results but toward mediating between the world and the child. Adults bear responsibility for introducing the young to an existing world while enabling its renewal. “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it,” she writes (Arendt 1961, p. 196). Education thus operates at the intersection of labor, work, and action. It involves labor in sustaining growth, work in transmitting durability, and action in recognizing each child as a unique beginning. Parenting parallels this triad. It sustains life, shapes continuity, and discloses relation. Both practices are oriented toward continuity without foreclosure and responsibility without domination, even as they are increasingly drawn into contemporary regimes of evaluation and governance.

Read in light of feminist critiques of developmentalism and intensive parenting, this mediation becomes increasingly constrained by pressures to align care with measurable outcomes and future-oriented success. The Arendtian framework helps clarify how this shift narrows the space for action, reducing relational engagement to forms of evaluation and performance.

At the same time, Arendt insists that education should remain distinct from politics, shielding children from political struggle until maturity. “Children are not yet ready for politics,” she writes, “because they are not yet fully of the world” (Arendt 1961, p. 177). This position raises a critical question. If children are outside politics, what of those who care for them? As Dietz (2002) observes, Arendt’s boundary between education and politics reproduces her broader exclusion of reproduction and care, even though both sustain political renewal and remain deeply entangled with political power.

2.6. The Public and Private Divide and Feminist Critiques

Arendt’s distinctions rest on the classical separation between public and private life. In her formulation, the household is the sphere of necessity, while the public realm is where freedom, speech, and collective action unfold. Labor is situated within the private world of survival and maintenance, whereas work and, above all, action belong to the public domain. This hierarchy, inherited from the Greek polis, underpins Arendt’s elevation of politics above the conditions required to sustain life and helps explain how care can be treated as socially indispensable yet politically secondary.

Feminist theorists have long demonstrated the limits of this division. Honig (1995) argues that Arendt’s relegation of the household to the realm of necessity reproduces the gendered hierarchies she sought to critique. By framing care as nonpolitical, Arendt obscures how power, dependence, and inequality circulate within intimate life. Benhabib (1996) likewise shows that Arendt underestimates the mutual constitution of public and private spheres. Without the ongoing and often invisible labor of reproduction and care, public life could not be sustained. More recent scholarship advances this critique by emphasizing that domestic labor, emotional labor, and caregiving are not background support functions but central to the very possibility of political life (Bhattacharya 2017; Fraser 2016; Tronto 2017). Pitkin (1998) further argues that practices of maintenance and care carry political meaning because they shape the conditions of human interdependence and are organized through institutions, labor markets, and policy arrangements that distribute vulnerability unevenly.

Feminist maternal scholarship has further emphasized that parenting itself is a key site where this entanglement of care, power, and inequality becomes visible, as maternal practices are shaped by gendered expectations, racialized surveillance, and unequal access to social support (Collins 2000; O’Reilly 2016; Ruddick 1995). These perspectives underscore that care is not only socially necessary but also differentially valued, recognized, and regulated across social positions.

These insights are especially instructive for understanding parenting. If parenting is confined to the private sphere, it appears apolitical and reducible to personal responsibility or family values. Yet parenting is profoundly shaped by public forces, including legal standards of “good parenting,” state surveillance through child welfare systems, cultural expectations of mothering and fathering, and the distribution of social resources that support or undermine caregiving (Gillies 2021; Macvarish 2023). Parenting exposes the instability of Arendt’s boundary. It is lived simultaneously as private intimacy and public responsibility, as necessity and freedom, as labor and action. In this sense, parenting becomes a point where macro-level governance enters everyday life, not as abstract policy but as felt pressure, scrutiny, and expectation.

This perspective aligns with existing feminist analyses that treat the household as a site of governance and contestation, while extending them by using Arendt’s distinctions to clarify how different dimensions of parenting are valued, obscured, or rendered visible within dominant frameworks.

Taken together, Arendt’s distinctions and their feminist reinterpretations ground this paper’s central argument. Parenting cannot be understood only through the lens of labor, as survival work, nor only as work, reducible to productive outcomes. Such approaches either naturalize parenting as an obligation or instrumentalize it as optimization. Instead, like education, parenting must be understood as action, a relational practice that brings newness into the world, discloses identity, and affirms plurality. This formulation does not introduce relational or political accounts of parenting as new but offers a way of specifying them through Arendt’s conceptual vocabulary. Recognizing parenting as action does not abandon Arendt’s framework. It reorients it, dissolving the rigid boundary between household and polis and grounding the human condition in interdependence as a political foundation.

3. Parenting as Labor, Work, and Action

3.1. Parenting as Labor: The Cycles of Care and the Politics of Necessity

Applying Arendt’s distinctions to parenting begins with labor. Parenting involves a wide range of repetitive, life-sustaining activities such as feeding infants, changing diapers, soothing children to sleep, preparing meals, managing hygiene, and maintaining bodily well-being. These activities are cyclical and ongoing. They do not yield durable artifacts but are consumed within the process of living. As Arendt (1958) observes, labor “corresponds to the biological process of the human body” and is “bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor” (p. 7). Parenting as labor situates caregivers within the realm of necessity, where the rhythms of life dictate activity. Parents often describe early childrearing as exhausting cycles of bodily care, marked by repetition and interruption. The demands of infants and young children vividly enact what Arendt associates with labor, actions essential to survival yet resistant to completion. No meal prepared today eliminates tomorrow’s hunger.

Parenting in this sense unfolds within biological time, marked by growth, fatigue, and renewal. It is also a time of intimacy, composed of small, repetitive acts through which a child is kept alive and gradually learns to trust the world, often under conditions that offer limited recognition or support. Feminist maternal scholarship has long emphasized that these practices are not only biological necessities but forms of relational and ethical engagement through which care, dependency, and responsibility are lived (Ruddick 1995). Yet viewing parenting solely through the lens of labor raises significant political and normative questions. Arendt, following the Greek model, treated labor as private and apolitical. In contemporary societies, caregiving labor is deeply political. Its distribution is structured by gender, class, race, and state policy. Feminist scholars have shown that the invisibility of reproductive labor sustains inequality, leaving women disproportionately responsible for domestic and caregiving work (Glenn 1992; Pateman 1988). Parenting as labor thus exemplifies not only necessity but the politics of necessity.

Empirical research underscores these inequalities. Even in dual-earner households, women continue to perform the majority of childcare and domestic work (Bianchi et al. 2012; Craig and Mullan 2010). The “second shift” remains a defining feature of gendered life (Hochschild and Machung 2012). Paid caregivers, who are often racialized and immigrant women, are underpaid and undervalued, reflecting the broader devaluation of reproductive labor (Folbre 2001). Although Arendt confined labor to the private realm, parenting reveals its entanglement with power, inequality, and institutional arrangements. Necessity is therefore never only biological. It is lived through uneven exhaustion, uneven recognition, and uneven access to support, shaped by policy choices that determine whose care is buffered and whose care is stretched thin. Recent feminist scholarship has further examined how these inequalities are intensified under neoliberal governance, where care is increasingly privatized and evaluated through performance-based logics (Ennis 2014; O’Reilly 2021).

3.2. Parenting as Work: Durability, Projects, and the Child as Future

Parenting also aligns with Arendt’s category of work, which she defines as “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence… [and] provides an ‘artificial’ world of things” (Arendt 1958, p. 7). Work differs from labor in that it produces durable forms that outlast their makers and stabilize human existence over time. Although parenting does not fabricate material objects, it often takes on a work-like character, as parents orient their efforts toward shaping children as future participants in the social world. In this framing, children are frequently imagined as the outcomes of parental endeavor, with their achievements serving as visible evidence of parental work.

This orientation is central to contemporary parenting cultures. Models of intensive parenting cast parents as architects of children’s development, responsible for structuring daily life, securing enrichment, and managing risk across multiple domains (Faircloth 2014; Hays 1996). Parenting becomes a forward-looking project of world-building, organized around the anticipation of future success. The child’s future is rendered continually urgent, so that the present is evaluated largely in terms of what it promises to deliver later, and uncertainty itself comes to feel like a parental failure in need of correction.

Arendt’s reflections on education illuminate both the ethical promise and the danger of this orientation. In The Crisis in Education (Arendt 1961), she describes education as an adult responsibility to mediate between the child and the world, preserving what is worth transmitting while allowing for renewal. “Education,” she writes, “is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it” (Arendt 1961, p. 196). Parenting understood as work similarly carries a dual responsibility. It is oriented toward continuity without foreclosure, toward sustaining a shared world without closing off the child’s capacity for beginning.

Yet this framework is easily instrumentalized. When children are approached primarily as the products of parental design, their unpredictability and plurality are constrained. As Pitkin (1998) notes, Arendt’s category of work privileges stability, intention, and control, qualities that can narrow the space for spontaneity and surprise. In parenting, this tendency surfaces in achievement-oriented cultures that prioritize performance over relation. Middle-class practices of concerted cultivation (Lareau 2011) reinforce these hierarchies by defining structured investment as normative while casting less intensive forms of parenting as deficient. Parenting as work thus risks transforming care into production and difference into deficiency. What is at stake is not only the child’s openness but the parent’s capacity to remain in relation without converting that relation into a metric of success or failure, a space where uncertainty can still be held rather than resolved through control.

Read alongside feminist critiques of intensive parenting and developmentalism, this orientation reflects broader pressures to align care with productivity, evaluation, and future-oriented success, translating relational practices into measurable outputs. The Arendtian distinction helps clarify this shift by distinguishing analytically between sustaining life, shaping futures, and remaining in relation.

3.3. Parenting as Action: Disclosure, Relation, and Presence

The most transformative dimension of Arendt’s framework emerges when parenting is understood as action. For Arendt, action is the activity through which individuals disclose who they are in the presence of others. It is relational, performative, and unpredictable, grounded in plurality and natality. “With word and deed,” she writes, “we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth” (Arendt 1958, p. 176). From this perspective, parenting is neither a series of tasks nor a project of construction alone. It does not displace labor or work, but exceeds them, appearing as a relational practice through which parents come to appear as particular persons through care.

Parenting as action is performative in the sense that parents enact and negotiate norms through everyday gestures of presence and response. Yet it remains distinctly Arendtian in its emphasis on disclosure, on revealing who one is rather than demonstrating what one can accomplish. What matters here is not the absence of effort or responsibility, but the refusal to equate care solely with measurable achievement. What is disclosed is not a fixed identity but a way of being with others, how one listens, how one responds, and how one remains present when certainty is unavailable and normative scripts offer little guidance.

While feminist maternal scholarship has long emphasized the relational and ethical character of care (O’Reilly 2016; Ruddick 1995), Arendt’s concept of action clarifies how such relationality operates as disclosure, through which parents appear within shared fields of recognition, judgment, and inequality. This allows parenting to be understood not only as a relational practice but as a mode of being that is socially visible and politically structured.

Parenting as action also foregrounds unpredictability. Children, as beings of natality, embody newness and initiate change. Parents encounter this unpredictability daily as children resist expectations, surprise those who care for them, and reshape relationships. Parenting as action acknowledges that parents do not fully control outcomes but participate in a shared unfolding, one that cannot be entirely planned or secured in advance. This does not negate guidance, care, or intention, but situates them within relations that remain open rather than fully programmable. It values presence, recognition, and responsiveness over productivity or mastery.

At the same time, this relational exposure renders parenting deeply political. Decisions about schooling, vaccination, discipline, or care are rarely private, as they are interpreted through shared moral frameworks and institutional norms. Parents appear publicly as moral actors, disclosing values and identities that are subject to judgment and regulation. Feminist theorists such as Young (1990) and Benhabib (1996) remind us that the family is not external to politics but foundational to it. Parenting as action thus reveals both identity and belonging within a plural social world, where care unfolds across intimate relation and public evaluation. To parent is to inhabit a double scene: an intimate space of attachment and an external space of scrutiny, where care is continually translated into signs that others interpret within unequal fields of power and recognition.

Ultimately, parenting weaves together all three dimensions Arendt describes. Labor sustains life, work builds continuity, and action discloses relation. Contemporary parenting cultures, however, tend to privilege labor and work, emphasizing tasks, techniques, and outcomes, while marginalizing the relational depth of action. Recognizing parenting as action does not undo labor or work, but reorients their meaning, reclaiming care as a practice of being with others rather than doing for them, and restoring its human and political significance. In this sense, the contribution of this framework is not to introduce relational understandings of parenting, but to clarify how they can be conceptualized through distinctions that illuminate the tensions between necessity, production, and relational presence. It also allows parenting to be understood not as a private achievement but as a shared exposure, a collective engagement in sustaining a world where newness can arrive and be met without being immediately converted into performance or proof.

4. Critique of Parental Normativity as Doing

4.1. The Rise of Intensive Parenting

Over recent decades, parenting in Western societies has come to be shaped by what Hays (1996) described as intensive mothering, a model that demands extraordinary investments of time, energy, and emotional attunement to children’s development. Within this framework, being a “good” parent means being child-centered, self-sacrificing, and guided by expert authority. Parents are expected to manage nearly every aspect of a child’s growth and potential, subordinating their own needs to those of the child while relying on scientific and professional validation. What often remains unspoken is how quickly these expectations shift from aspiration to moral obligation, shaping how parents understand themselves and are judged by others across institutional and cultural settings.

Feminist maternal scholarship has long critically examined these dynamics, showing how ideals of intensive mothering are historically and culturally produced rather than natural or universal, and how they reproduce gendered expectations of care and responsibility (Hays 1996; O’Reilly 2016).

What began as a sociological description has hardened into a powerful cultural norm. Expectations that parents must continually supervise, plan, and stimulate their children have spread across class and cultural contexts (Faircloth 2014; Lee et al. 2014). Parenting is increasingly evaluated through visible forms of doing, including attending school events, managing extracurricular activities, monitoring behavior, and demonstrating constant involvement. In Furedi’s (2002) account of paranoid parenting, every action and inaction appears potentially decisive for a child’s future, producing persistent pressure and leaving little space for uncertainty or error. Under these conditions, care becomes something that must be continuously demonstrated, recorded, and defended, rather than lived as a relational practice.

4.2. Outcomes, Competence, and the Politics of Evaluation

Within cultures of doing, competence is measured through outcomes. Parenting is assessed not only by parental practices but by children’s achievements. Academic success, behavioral compliance, and extracurricular distinction become proxies for parental virtue. Many parents internalize this linkage, interpreting children’s successes and struggles as reflections of their own competence (Lareau 2011). The child’s performance becomes a surface upon which parental worth is repeatedly read and publicly assessed.

This logic transforms parenting into a project of production. Breastfeeding, for example, is often valued less for its relational meaning than for its scientifically validated benefits to brain development (Faircloth 2014). Early childhood programs are justified through their projected “returns” in human capital (Heckman 2006). Care is translated into investment, and affection into productivity, infusing intimate relations with the language of efficiency and yield. Parents are held responsible for outcomes they cannot fully control, while structural determinants such as poverty and discrimination recede from view (Gillies 2005). Lee et al. (2014) describe this dynamic as parental determinism, the belief that outcomes are traceable to parental doing alone. Uncertainty and contingency are treated not as features of relational life but as correctable failures of management.

These pressures are profoundly gendered and racialized. Despite some increases in paternal involvement, cultural norms continue to equate good motherhood with constant availability and self-sacrifice (Dermott 2008; Wall 2010). Policy and professional practice reinforce this asymmetry. Mothers are the primary targets of welfare and child protection oversight, where competence is assessed through compliance, emotional regulation, and cooperation with institutional demands (Gillies 2021; Roberts 2022). Black mothers in the United States and Indigenous and immigrant mothers in settler states are frequently judged against white, middle-class norms that disregard cultural difference and collective caregiving practices (Roberts 2002; Libesman 2016). Under these conditions, parenting norms operate as techniques of discipline, sorting families through everyday encounters with professionals, institutions, and surveillance systems.

4.3. The Costs and Governance of Doing

The consequences of this regime are substantial. Parents report chronic guilt, fatigue, and anxiety, and immersion in intensive parenting is associated with lower well-being and elevated stress, particularly among mothers (Liss et al. 2013; Nomaguchi and Milkie 2020). Children also experience the effects of over-scheduling and constant monitoring, including reduced autonomy and heightened anxiety (Lareau 2011; Rosenfeld and Wise 2000). Doing begins to crowd out being, as time together is increasingly valued for its developmental payoff rather than for shared presence or mutual attunement.

These dynamics reflect broader mechanisms of governance. Following Foucault (1991), power in modern societies operates through the production of self-regulating subjects rather than overt coercion. Parenting functions as a key site of this governmentality, as parents internalize vigilance, productivity, and risk management as moral imperatives. They are tasked with managing structural risks, including inequality and exclusion, through personal conduct (Gillies 2005; Lee et al. 2014). Parenting becomes a primary means through which states govern through freedom, cultivating subjects who discipline themselves in the name of care.

Risk discourse intensifies this logic. As Douglas (1992) and Beck (1992) observe, late modern societies are organized around the anticipation and management of risk. Within parenting, everyday acts such as feeding, screen time, and schooling are framed as potential hazards requiring constant oversight. Responsibility is privatized and failure individualized. What is governed in this process is not only behavior but the affective life of parents themselves, as anxiety, vigilance, and self-surveillance become normalized expressions of care.

4.4. Performance, Expertise, and the Limits of Doing

Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity offers an additional lens. Like gender, competent parenting is constituted through repeated performances that seek recognition. Care is rendered visible through packed lunches, school appearances, curated routines, and increasingly through digital display. Recognition depends on continuous demonstration. Digital parenting cultures amplify this performative economy, inviting comparison and internalized scrutiny across classed and gendered lines of visibility (Abidin 2017).

Professional expertise reinforces this dynamic. Psychological and neuroscientific discourses increasingly frame good parenting as a technical practice governed by evidence-based procedures (Wall 2010; Wastell and White 2012). Parents are positioned as implementers of expert instruction rather than as relational actors situated within social contexts. Overreliance on brain science, as Wastell and White (2012) caution, risks obscuring the social determinants of well-being and imposing unrealistic expectations of control. Care is translated into compliance, and uncertainty is treated as failure rather than as a constitutive feature of relational life.

The doing paradigm also marginalizes those whose practices diverge from normative scripts. Working-class, racialized, and immigrant parents are disproportionately surveilled and sanctioned for perceived noncompliance (Gillies 2005; Roberts 2002). In child protection systems, parental cooperation is frequently assessed through visible indicators such as attendance at mandated programs or documentation of routines, with perceived noncompliance shaping decisions to escalate intervention or prolong surveillance (Donnelly 2023; Roberts 2002). Fathers who express care through play or emotional presence rather than supervision are often misread as inattentive or irresponsible (Dermott 2008). Difference becomes deficit once care is assessed primarily through standardized action and administrative legibility.

Doing, of course, remains essential, and parenting always involves labor and work; what is at stake is not their removal, but the way they are valued, interpreted, and governed when competence is reduced to visible performance and measurable outcomes. Feeding, nurturing, and guiding are necessary aspects of care. The problem emerges when parenting is reduced to visible doing, when love is equated with measurable intensity and success with compliance. This reduction burdens families, reproduces inequality, and obscures the relational and existential depth of care. Parenting is reframed as a performance, technical project, and moral test rather than as a lived relation unfolding over time.

From this perspective, the contribution of the present framework is not to reject existing critiques of intensive parenting but to clarify how these dynamics can be understood through the distinction between labor, work, and action, making visible how relational presence is systematically displaced by evaluative and productive logics.

5. Parenting as Being and Collective Care: Toward a Politics of Presence

Reframing parenting as being necessarily widens the analytic lens. If parenting is not simply a set of actions but a way of being with others, its endurance depends on more than individual effort. Privatization, economic precarity, and moral scrutiny constrain the conditions under which such presence can be sustained, making it difficult to treat care as a shared social concern rather than an individual burden. To affirm parenting as being, therefore, requires looking beyond the family to the social and institutional arrangements that enable care.

In Arendt’s terms, parenting belongs to the fabric of the common world, the network of relationships and shared institutions that make appearance and action possible. Human life unfolds among others, never in isolation. Action takes place in a public space where people appear to one another and reveal who they are through relation. Seen through this lens, parenting is not a sealed domestic practice but a form of participation in a shared world, one that renews that world through the welcome of new beginnings.

When responsibility for this renewal is individualized, parents are left to shoulder a collective task alone. Structural deficits such as underfunded schools, unaffordable childcare, and long working hours are reframed as parental shortcomings. Love is pressed into a regime of proof, expected to demonstrate itself through performance, compliance, and visible intensity. Parenting as being breaks with this logic. It calls for a politics of presence in which relational life is treated not as a private luxury but as a social condition. Presence here is not a personal virtue but a socially mediated capacity, expanding or contracting in relation to the supports made available for care.

This reframing carries concrete implications for research, practice, and policy. For research, it suggests moving beyond behavioral indicators and outcome-based measures toward approaches that examine relational presence, temporal unfolding, and the interactional dynamics through which care is lived and negotiated. For social work and professional practice, it calls for a shift away from compliance-based evaluation toward relational engagement, where practitioners attend not only to what parents do but to how care is sustained under conditions of constraint, uncertainty, and inequality. This includes recognizing diverse caregiving practices rather than evaluating them against standardized norms of competence.

For policy, the implications are equally significant. When parenting is evaluated primarily through visible doing, responsibility is individualized and surveillance is intensified, particularly for families already facing structural disadvantage. Re-centering parenting as a relational and collective practice shifts attention toward the infrastructures that make care possible, including accessible childcare, equitable education systems, adequate income supports, and labor conditions that allow time for care. From this perspective, family well-being cannot be secured through parental effort alone but depends on shared responsibility across households, communities, and states.

Bringing Arendt’s concept of action into dialogue with family life thus reorients attention toward the common world in which parenting unfolds and toward the collective conditions required for care to be lived as presence rather than performance. In this sense, the framework developed here contributes to ongoing contemporary feminist maternal debates on care, inequality, and governance, offering a way to conceptualize parenting as a relational and politically structured practice rather than an individualized performance.

Read together, these arguments suggest that parenting is not only a private practice but a public and relational achievement, one that discloses the conditions under which care, plurality, and human flourishing become possible. To take parenting seriously as action is therefore to take responsibility for the common world in which families live, struggle, and sustain one another across difference and vulnerability.