Modern Parenting is Hard

It's harder to be a parent now than it used to be.

All the evidence I need came from my mom (who had five kids) when she tried to put on Eli’s pajamas. (To clarify, she was putting Eli into his pajamas not putting them on herself. See, even writing about modern parenting is difficult). Anyway,  as she put it, "I couldn't get the legs on the right sides." Bedtime is hard enough without professional mother confusing jammy legs.

Everything is so complicated. There are books on how to be a good dad, and books about books on how to be a good dad, and websites about books, about books... There is music you’re supposed to play for your child before they’re born. This means you can now ruin your kid’s life before they’re even breathing air. No pressure.

You Baby Boomers parents had it easy. You never had to compare 35 different carseats to find the safest one, or inspect every toy for lead paint, or deal with the embarrassment of your baby throwing a fit in the middle of your double no foam venti macchiati order. Yeah, there was that inherent threat of a communist  takeover, nuclear instability, and the insidious stupefying of society via television, but how does that even compare to modern day oppressive threats like, I don’t know, rash causing scented fabric softener? See, it doesn’t.

Do you have any idea how many types of flu you have to be on the lookout for these days? There are seasonal flus, bird flus, and flus that look like car license plates (H1N1). Gone are the days when you only needed to be vigilant for that one plague. All you had to do was tell the kids not to lick any rats on their way home from their 14 hour shift of plowing fields and you were golden. Nowadays, disease prevention is a clustered mess of tissues, water, soap, antihistamines, and elbow sneezes. It’s just overwhelming.

So maybe this assessment isn’t fair. Maybe things aren’t really so different. After all, in the 70s (as evinced by a 1974 Time magazine article) parents had to worry about global cooling and another ice age in the same way modern parents have to worry about global warming and the sea rising. In the Middle Ages economic hard times were a daily concern, just as they are today. And in the 1920s parents had to deal with Prohibition while today we have to deal with... Ok there’s really no comparison here. Things were worse for them.

I don’t mean to make modern parenting to seem like an easy endeavor or modern parents to seem self centered or hapless. Parenting, in any age or era, is a challenge and full of difficult situations and decisions. Today’s technologies alone can present new and serious issues for modern parents. But, perhaps before performing a mini “woe is me!” soliloquy in our minds, modern parents should take a look back and recall some of the things our parents had to deal with. Including us.