Quick summary: Parental confidence grows from belonging and shared support rather than from carrying child outcomes alone, and when that social ground weakens parents can feel estranged from everyday care. Performance culture, expert scrutiny, and economic insecurity can turn present moments with children into tests of future success, feeding guilt and self doubt that harm parental mental health and well being. The essay’s practical claim is that families, services, and policy should restore recognition and relational support so parenting is treated as shared care rather than isolated individual failure.
Many parents today feel that their children’s happiness, behaviour, and future success rest entirely on their shoulders. That pressure can leave mothers and fathers questioning their own competence, even when they are doing their very best.
A new essay argues that parental confidence is not simply a personal trait but is shaped by whether parents feel they belong and are recognised and supported by the people and institutions around them. When those conditions weaken, it suggests, parents can become estranged from the very practice of care.
The essay, published in Psychology International, was written by Vered Ben David from Carleton University. Rather than reporting new data, it is a theoretical piece that brings together psychology, sociology, childhood studies, alienation theory, and phenomenology.
Psychological research has long focused on parental self-efficacy, meaning parents’ belief in their ability to influence their children’s development and well-being. The essay does not dismiss this work but asks how such belief becomes possible in the first place.
Drawing on existing research, the author points to evidence that social support is associated with parenting self-efficacy, including among first-time mothers. While such studies do not prove that belonging causes confidence, they support the idea that efficacy is shaped by social relationships.
According to the essay, modern parenting culture treats raising children as an intensive and individual responsibility, judged against expert advice and developmental benchmarks. When children struggle, this can be read as a sign of parental failure, drawing attention away from wider social and economic conditions.
Ben David said the work grew from watching that burden take hold. “What prompted me to write this essay was something I had been observing for some time, both in my research and in my work with parents. At the same time, much of the responsibility for raising children has shifted onto individual parents, even though caring for children has always depended on families, communities, institutions, and wider social support.”
The author uses the idea of alienation, in the social sense of estrangement rather than the family law term, to describe how this pressure feels. Digital monitoring tools, a growing marketplace of parenting experts, and economic insecurity can all leave parents doubting their own judgement.
“This led me to think about alienation,” she said. “When parenting becomes organised around performance, measurement, expert expectations, and future outcomes, something can be lost in the parent-child relationship itself. I am interested in how we might make that interaction more relational and less structured around constant evaluation and achievement, allowing more room for presence, mutual recognition, spontaneity, and simply being with one’s child.”
The essay also explores parental guilt through the lens of time. Everyday moments are increasingly measured against imagined futures, such as school readiness or later employability, making it harder for parents to simply inhabit the present with their children.
Experiences of alienation are not shared equally. The author notes that migration, poverty, and racialised marginalisation can intensify isolation, while extended families, religious communities, and neighbourhood networks often provide important sources of solidarity.
The essay argues that belonging never disappears entirely. Reading together, sharing humour, and unstructured play remain moments in which meaning returns and care cannot be reduced to performance or measurable outcomes.
“I would also like parents to feel that they do not have to turn every interaction with a child into an intervention, a lesson, or an investment in a future outcome,” Ben David said. “Parenting does not take place in isolation, and difficulties in parenting should not automatically be understood as individual failure.”
The author acknowledges that much of the research drawn upon concerns mothers in Western settings, so the framework may not apply equally to fathers or other caregivers. As a theoretical account, it is interpretive rather than causal and needs testing across different family forms and cultures.
Future qualitative and comparative research could explore how recognition and responsibility are lived in practice. Ben David said she is now extending the argument. “I am continuing to develop this work into a broader model for understanding parenting and the politics of care under contemporary capitalism. I hope this work can help both parents and professionals working with families recognise when systems of support and intervention become too focused on assessment, performance, and correction, and how we might restore more relational ways of encountering children.”
For now, the essay suggests that parental confidence is best understood as something built together with others rather than carried alone.
