a parent: a person's father or mother, and in the plural the two of them together as one's parents
This is the ordinary word for a parent, but in the New Testament it turns up almost entirely in the plural, meaning "parents": a child's father and mother named together as a pair. It is a plain family word with no built-in judgment about whether the parents are good or bad, near or far.
Its range is set by the situations it appears in rather than by any shift in what it means. It covers the everyday care of a household (Jesus' parents bringing him to the temple, Paul's remark that parents save up for their children), the honor children owe (the command that children obey their parents), and the pain of a family torn apart (Jesus' warning that children will hand their parents over to death). In every case it still simply means the mother and father.
The word belongs to the same family as the verb "to beget," so at root it points to those who gave a person life. It names the living parents in view, as distinct from a person's earlier forebears, for which Greek uses a different word (πρόγονος).