Abstract

This paper examines intensive parenting as a dominant cultural model within contemporary Anglo-American and Western European parenting cultures, situating it within late-capitalist demands for individual responsibility, optimisation, and future-oriented risk management. This theoretical and discourse-analytic paper advances a Lacanian account of intensive parenting as a libidinal formation structured through fantasy, desire, and jouissance. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analysis explores how parental investment in intensive parenting is sustained not only through social norms and institutional pressures but through affective and unconscious attachments that render these demands compelling even when they are experienced as exhausting and exclusionary. While existing feminist and sociological scholarship has documented the classed, gendered, and racialized dimensions of intensive parenting, less attention has been paid to the psychic mechanisms through which parents become attached to these norms. This paper addresses this gap by examining how fantasies surrounding the child’s future organise parental desire and enjoyment. Focusing on fantasy, the object-cause of desire, and jouissance, the paper shows how intensive parenting offers moral coherence and reassurance under conditions of uncertainty while remaining structurally impossible to fulfill. These libidinal investments translate market rationalities into intimate life, shaping parental subjectivity and sustaining intensive parenting as a dominant norm. The analysis suggests that this persistence is tied not only to social regulation but to the way desire is organised around an unattainable future object. The paper concludes by reflecting on how this analysis reframes relational modes of being in parenting, suggesting that attending to lack, contingency, and relational openness may support forms of care that move beyond imperatives of control, productivity, and future optimisation.

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