Most people become parents, and everyone who ever lived has had parents. Parenting is both an instrumental occupation as well as a normal stage in the life course. Parenthood's primary function is attention and action toward the child. Parents create people. Parents are entrusted with the abiding task to prepare offspring of the next generation for the physical, psychosocial, and economic conditions in which that generation will eventually fare and hopefully flourish. Amidst the plethora of influences on child development, parents are the 'final common pathway' to child development and stature, adjustment and success. But parenting is fraught with small and large stresses and disappointments; parents today are ever less secure in their roles, even in the face of rising environmental and institutional demands that they assume increasing responsibility for their offspring. The transition to parenting is formidable; the onrush of new stages of parenthood is relentless.
Parenting also has consequences for parents. Parenthood can enhance psychological development, self-confidence, and sense of well-being, and parenthood affords adults opportunities to confront new challenges and to test and display diverse competencies. Parents derive considerable and continuing pleasure in their relationships and activities with children. In the final analysis, parents receive a great deal 'in kind' for the hard work of parenting}they are often recipients of unconditional love, they gain skills, and they even pretend to immortality. Parenthood is therefore giving and responsibility, and parenting is frustrations, fears, and failures. But parenting has its own intrinsic pleasures, privileges, and profits.
Despite these compelling facts about parenting, parenting is highly subjective occupation and uncertain stage of life. Is being an at-home or a working mother better? Is day care, family care, or parent care best for a child? Does good parenting reflect intuition or experience? Is parenting unidimensional and monolithic, or multidimensional and pluralistic? How do children influence their parents? How do personality, knowledge, and world view affect parenting? How do social class, ethnic identity, culture, and history shape parenting? How do parents themselves conceive of parenting? What are the functions of parents' beliefs and behaviours? What particulars are entailed in parenting special children, such as preterm babies, twins, or children with disabilities? What does it mean for parenting to be an older parent, or one who is divorced, disabled, or drug abusing? What do prominent theories in psychology (psychoanalysis, personality theory, and behaviour genetics) contribute to our understanding of parenting? What are the goals parents have for themselves? For their children?