parenting

Pluralparentings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The raising of children, including their care, guidance, and education, from birth until they are grown.

   Modern parenting often means balancing work schedules against a child's daily needs.

   Experts disagree about which parenting styles produce the most confident children.

   Similarchild-rearing

   Note

   Mostly a mass noun, as in good parenting or modern parenting, but it can also be counted, and the plural parentings exists for setting one way of raising children against another. Unlike the verb form, the noun takes no direct object. You speak of the parenting of a teenager when you mean the activity as a thing, and of parenting a teenager when you mean the doing of it.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of parent.

   They are parenting their children through a difficult divorce.

   Parenting a teenager demands a different approach than parenting a toddler.

   Note

   This is the -ing form of a verb meaning to act as a parent. It follows be in progressive tenses (they are parenting alone), and as a gerund it keeps its verbal power to take a direct object: parenting a toddler. Computing has its own use of the verb, in which to parent objects is to give them a parent object, so they become its children. Parenting can therefore describe building a hierarchy as well as raising a child.

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