Parent engagement in children’s learning, education, and schooling (Goodall, 2018) plays a key role in students’ academic achievement, emotional well-being, and sense of belonging in the interrelated domains of home, school, and the community (Baquedano-López et al., 2013; Jeynes, 2011). The rise of “intensive parenting” (Hays, 1998), which created new expectations for parents to organize their children’s free time and advocate on their behalf to ensure academic success coincided with the shift to accountability in education policy, where parents rather than the state are seen as responsible for their children’s education (Vincent, 2017). Subsequently, parent engagement developed as a dual strategy of parents spending more time, money, and efforts to support their children’s education, and policymakers developing strategies to encourage schools to harness parent engagement to “improve” schools by raising students’ academic attainment (Leithwood & McElheron-Hopkins, 2004). Sociologists of education know that parents have different levels of economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and receive different return on their investment in the school system (Lareau, 2011). Such uneven playing field risks undermining equity (Antony-Newman, 2023), especially if educators privilege the engagement of some parents at the expense of others (Calarco, 2018). Educational inequality is increasing in the neoliberal context in particular, when for the first time in decades, members of the new generations face the prospects of downward social mobility (Piketty, 2014). In response, parents, especially in the middle classes, made a reasonable decision to minimize such risks by investing significant resources in children’s education (Weis et al., 2014), leading to a cycle of inequality.