Parenting is so interesting, isn't it? Suggesting that it may, in fact, be skilled, difficult, hard to get right, require practice, draw on various micro-skills (which are dispersed differentially throughout a population and may, themselves, require acquiring/refinement) threatens to open a veritable minefield.
For myself, I think one helpful analogy is learning how to play an instrument. It takes many hours of practice to acquire proficiency in an instrument. Many people can acquire proficiency if they put those hours in. Very few (but there are some) are limited in their ability to pick the skills up because of something innate that hampers them. Some people (very few) have an amazing aptitude. But for most people, it's about practice. And, of course, you can extend proficiency into real mastery and expertise.
When you think about it, you have a baby - and it's a shock. Some babies are quite 'easy', some are 'trickier', and some have quite complex needs. However 'easy', you have to make a series of rapid, quite profound re-adjustments. The skills are new but (relatively) simple. The biggest shift, I think, comes in altering your mindset: you have to alter your mode of being into a state of responsibility - and interpretation, I think. There's a lot more to say about this but I'm sure others have said it better.
I like Buffy's description of 'plaaning-response-re-planning'. That is so apt. It is like being in charge of establishing and/or monitoring a complex system - with no instructions.
So that goes on for a bit. And it's a bit like practising, practising, practising with an instrument. But the odd thing is, the system/instrument becomes incrementally more complex. And the skills it requires to be operated/interacted with become more complex. You scarcely notice.
The other difference between learning an instrument and parenting is that you are hugely incentivised to learn. The cost of failure is high. The margins are, mercifully, quite wide but ... emotionally, it's analogous to being forced to learn a piano by some terrifying person who is threatening to cause harm to your child if you 'fail'.
So most people don't fail. They learn fast, with high levels of competence.
By the time a child is five, say, your average mother will have put in an enormous number of hours of (highly-incentivised) practice. It's no wonder that we look as though it is 'nothing' and fairly effortless.
I suspect if many of us put in that number of hours, with that level of incentive, into brain surgery a lot of us would be pretty competent. Mind you, I think a better analogy might be with those groups of men and women who were mobilised and sent to the Front to work in field hospitals in the 1WW, being expected to pick up medical skills fast. Or the fighter pilots.
The fact that parenting is skilled work is probably less interesting to me than why this is so tricky to acknowledge; how that lack of acknowledgement limits our thinking and actions; and the thinking about what that 'skill' is comprised of.