Parenting, Belonging, and Social Alienation: A Phenomenology of Contemporary Parenthood

Parenting in contemporary societies is increasingly organized through tensions between individualized responsibility and socially embedded care. While psychological accounts have traditionally emphasized parental competencies, attachment, and individual functioning, they have devoted less attention to the social conditions through which parental efficacy becomes possible. This paper develops a theoretical psycho-social account of parenting that reconceptualizes parental efficacy as a relational accomplishment constituted through relations of belonging and social alienation rather than an individual attribute or possession. Through an integrative dialogue among psychology, sociology, childhood studies, alienation theory, and phenomenology, it argues that belonging is sustained through social recognition, collective support, and institutional embeddedness, whereas alienation emerges when these conditions become fragile and the burdens of care are individualized. Parenting is therefore understood not merely as a private psychological practice but as a lived psycho-social process through which broader social transformations are experienced and negotiated. The framework reconnects psychological understandings of parenting with the relational, institutional, and phenomenological conditions through which parental efficacy is constituted.