Let’s be real: Narcissa Malfoy was actually NOT the best parent in the Harry Potter series.
She gets a lot of praise for her vow with Snape and lying to Voldemort to protect Draco. And those definitely prove that her love for her son was unconditional and by the end, she would prioritize him over everything else.
But the thing is, she was quite a hypocrite.
She willingly chose to support Voldemort. She may not have been an official Death Eater, but she enabled Lucius in his tasks as a Death Eater and was backing Voldemort’s cause for years. Lucius was killing and torturing people all the time, and she didn’t care. He did not force her to be involved. She was as committed to fascism as he was. It’s even implied that she joined her husband in torturing the Muggles at the Quidditch World Cup, since Harry asked if Draco’s parents were still out there with their Death Eater masks (plural, not just one for Lucius) and Draco didn’t deny it.
And then Narcissa had the nerve to play the victim when Draco was tasked with a deadly mission, as if that isn’t exactly the path she and Lucius set him on in the first place by choosing to return to Voldemort when he came back to life!
I seriously don’t know what they were expecting when they agreed to keep on supporting someone like Voldemort. There’s no way either she or Lucius were under any illusions as to what Voldemort was capable of doing to his own followers if he grew tired of them. But it seems they were so convinced that they were firmly in his good graces that they played the victim when Lucius screwed up and got himself thrown in Azkaban. Narcissa even demanded that Bellatrix not blame Lucius for what happened, as if the blame was solely on Voldemort for deciding to punish them and not on themselves for getting involved with this maniac in the first place.
It’s quite hypocritical of Narcissa to willingly back a dangerous psychopathic fascist and let him live in her house, and then when her son is assigned a deadly mission, act like she had no idea such a thing could happen to the point of hysterical desperation to counteract it. It also shows some unheathily blind faith in her husband in that she never thought he could fall from grace and didn’t want him to be blamed for something that was technically his fault.
It’s similar to Snape, who also was quite the hypocrite to abandon Voldemort only when Lily was threatened because he knew from the getgo that by joining the Death Eaters, he’d be supporting the genocide of Lily’s kind.
Narcissa did do some remarkably brave things for her son, but these things don’t change or undo the fact that she played a big part in getting her son’s life endangered in the first place. It was her choices and her beliefs - as well as Lucius’s - that put Draco in danger.
This is why the best and most canon-based Malfoy fanfics - especially those about Draco’s redemption during or after the war - are the ones that don’t shy away from Narcissa’s role in Draco’s endangerment and trauma. She may be warm and loving to him directly, but indirectly, she’s certainly not innocent or blameless. You’re not gonna win any Parent of the Year awards if your choices end up dragging your child into a war as an underage soldier.