<![CDATA[Instagram content often juxtaposes two contrasting parenting styles, gentle parenting and VOC parenting, thereby sparking debates about parenting practices linked to social class. This study aims to explain how audiences construct gentle parenting through Instagram comments as an expression of class identity and a meaning negotiation. This research employs Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, specifically the concepts of capital, habitus, distinction, symbolic power, and the struggle over classification, to explain the relationship between digital communication practices and the reproduction of class structures. This research employs an interpretive qualitative approach with discourse analysis of comments on 30 Instagram posts that juxtapose Nikita Willy’s gentle parenting style and Lek Damis’ VOC parenting style during the 2024–2025. Of the 1,007 comments reviewed, 83 were analyzed based on Bourdieu’s concepts. The results show that the audience interprets gentle parenting as a practice dependent on economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. The audience primarily debates the distribution of privilege that enables the implementation of these parenting practices. The audience also actively evaluates, negotiates, and rejects the legitimacy of parenting narratives through comment sections. This study concludes that social media comment sections are digital communication arenas where the meaning of gentle parenting is produced, negotiated, and contested through class identity, and serve as spaces for a struggle over classification in both the establishment of and resistance to the legitimacy of parenting practices.]]>
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