In this essay, Richard Smith observes that being a parent, like so much else in our late-modern world, is required to become ever more efficient and effective, and is increasingly monitored by the agencies of the state, often with good reason given the many recorded instances of child abuse and cruelty. However, Smith goes on to argue, this begins to cast being a parent as a matter of "parenting," a technological deployment of skills and techniques, with the loss of older, more spontaneous and intuitive relations between parents and children. Smith examines this phenomenon further through a discussion of how it is captured to some extent in Hannah Arendt's notion of "natality" and how it is illuminated by Charles Dickens in his classic novel, "Dombey and Son."