Parenting is the skill and the daily work of looking after your own children — how you feed them, teach them, set rules, and comfort them. People talk about good parenting, strict parenting, helicopter parenting (hovering too close). The word became very common in the last few decades; older speakers might just have said “bringing up children.” Though actually, people stretch it a lot: parenting can mean a whole way of thinking, or just tonight’s fight about bedtime. It is about what you do. It is not parenthood (the fact of being a parent) and not parentage (the family you were born into). Magazines and schools love the word; at the kitchen table people still say “looking after the kids.”