What is actually happening
Concerned Parent was announced as playable from launch, alongside Paperboy, Lunchlady and Janitor. In practice, a set of players finished the required content and found the character still locked, which is what the bug report thread describes.
That thread is the important document here, because a developer account replied in it. The reply confirms the reports are on the team's radar, describes the fix as a top priority for the next patch, and asks whether other characters are unlocking correctly, noting that Concerned Parent is not the only one misbehaving.
So the honest state of things is a fix in progress. The character is meant to be available, the unlock is failing for some players, and the developers know.
Why this page will not give you unlock steps
Community threads do contain attempted conditions. You will see full exploration of the Forgotten Path, beating the boss on every route, and finding a specific hidden tunnel offered as the trigger. Those claims come from players who either did not unlock the character or unlocked them for unrelated reasons.
The contradiction is the evidence. Two players comparing notes can report opposite conditions and both be right about what they did, because the thing that is supposed to grant the unlock is not firing consistently. A guide that lists one condition as the answer would be picking a side in an unresolved disagreement.
The developers themselves framed it as an open question, asking whether other characters were also failing to unlock. That is not the language of a known, documented unlock rule.
What you can do while the fix is pending
Unlocks in this build are not permanently lost. At least one streamer kept playing after the character failed to appear and unlocked them later in the same session, so there is no reason to restart your save or abandon progress.
- Keep playing normal runs. The character can appear later without any change to your save file.
- Check the Steam discussions thread before assuming you did something wrong; other players are tracking the same reports there.
- Watch the patch notes on the Steam news hub. A top-priority fix for the next patch is what the developer reply describes.
The other playable characters are worth using while you wait, and they are not cosmetic swaps. Each has its own Combat and Explore deck, and the character you pick changes which camp buildings and card pools you see.
What the character plays like once you have them
Concerned Parent is built around drawing cards rather than raw damage, so the deck fills your hand and asks you to work out which order the cards want to be played in. That makes card draw itself the resource, and it rewards upgrades that add draw or reduce costs over upgrades that simply add damage.
The character's own camp building is the Shrine, which offers a choice of moods rather than a straight stat increase. One of those moods is apathy, which does nothing at all, so the building is a decision rather than a free upgrade.
The Shrine and the draw-focused playstyle are community and in-game observations rather than official descriptions. Treat the exact mood list as something to check in the build you are playing.
How many characters the game has
You will see the number quoted as three, four, five and seven, and the counts disagree because each one is answering a different question. Four is what the developers named as playable at launch in their own launch video. Five appears in coverage that counts a character added during Early Access. Seven appears on a database page that lists entries regardless of whether they are available yet.
When a number is quoted anywhere, including on this site, the useful question is what it is counting and when it was counted. Fair warning applies to any source, including this one: Early Access rosters change with patches.