Most people associate the term "being a parent" with happiness, contentment, mutual love and satisfying the deep human needs of giving and receiving attention and love. The parent-child relationship is a powerful emotional experience. However, parenting is an extremely complex and demanding role, raising a child is a long and often uncertain process that requires parents to think a lot, listen, feel, understand and constantly get to know their own child. Parents are expected to possess certain competencies needed to face the challenges that parenting brings. A competent parent thinks of upbringing as a challenge he knows and can accept, improves his knowledge of the child and parenting, recognizes the child's needs and creates conditions for them to be successfully met. In doing so, by using socially acceptable methods of upbringing that ensure the preservation of the child's integrity. The parent-child relationship is also influenced by the personality characteristics of the parents, parenting styles, socioeconomic status of the family, the quality of the marital relationship and the availability of people and institutions that provide support. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the basic features of parenting, with special emphasis on parental competencies. It is important to emphasize that parenting procedures have a key role in building a quality relationship between parents and children and directly affect the child's development and life path. The child is seen as an active subject of his development who has his own needs and rights, and every parent, above all, should have a vision of parenthood that wants to achieve in the upbringing of his child. Accordingly, a competent parent shapes its behavior, monitors and evaluates the effects of its educational activities on the child, constantly makes self-assessment, changes and improves itself and uses all available resources to improve its parenting competencies.