As a child, I remember digging into my brown paper bag lunch at school and finding health food peanut butter on whole wheat bread, an apple and a dime to buy a carton of plain white milk. Around me, kids pulled all sorts of wonders from their lunchboxes: Vienna sausages with bright yellow mustard, warm Spaghettios in a thermos, baloney on Wonder Bread, Fritos, Oreos and jewel-like pomegranates. They chatted and swapped food. I didn’t. No one ever wanted to trade for mix-it-up peanut butter.
Now, three decades later, when I send my 11-year-old daughter to school, her lunchbox is filled with treats to trade or share (and healthy food, too): fruit rollups, Cheese Nips, an occasional chocolate- covered Oreo divided into smaller pieces, and the pomegranate I longed for as a child. She’ll never feel left out at lunch, I hope.
So am I doing a better job raising her than my mom did raising me? When it comes to school lunches, you bet. I think.
Or am I giving her too much junk food? And am I stepping in too much to help her make and keep friends?
Okay. Maybe I’m obsessing here. But the answer to the question—are we doing a better job than our own parents?—isn’t so simple.
What is clear: We are parenting differently. Why? It’s not necessarily because we’re unhappy with how we were raised overall or how we turned out. But we may want to spare our children the moments of pain we felt as kids—such as the social isolation that made me dread lunchtime; or protect our kids from threats to their health and safety—obesity, danger on the Internet, sexual, violent and simply crude influences in pop culture.
Does different mean better? Not necessarily. “The Baby Boomers are bringing passion and interest to parenting,” says Barbara Strom Thompson, a Chevy Chase child development expert. But, she warns, “A lot of times, the pendulum can swing too far.” The physics of parenting means that for everything our generation is trying to do well—nurturing our children, listening to them, providing choices and opportunities—there can be an equal and opposite reaction: lack of self-reliance, sense of entitlement, too much stress.
Parents in the Bethesda area have more advantages than our own parents had: We tend to be more mature—or at least older—when our first child was born (my mom was 20; I was 31), better educated and more affluent. We generally have fewer children and are more involved in their lives, particularly fathers, compared to a generation ago. Many of us genuinely enjoy spending time with our kids and, for the most part, like hearing their opinions. “For our parents, it was, ‘you can be seen and not heard,’” laughs Chevy Chase stay-at-home mom Sarah Grannis.“ For us, it was, ‘you can be seen and heard sometimes.’ Now, it’s as if we want to hear from you 24/7 exactly what you are thinking!”
We know so much more about how children develop and the dangers—both real and perceived—our kids may face. And so we think, worry, even obsess more: Will our kids succeed? Are we setting enough limits? Or too many? Are we providing them with enough opportunities? Or over-scheduling them? Are we spending enough quality time with them? Or are we too focused on them? Are we protecting them enough? Or are we failing to let them learn from their mistakes? Are we providing them with the things we longed for as children? Or do we give them too much?
“I think every parent does the best they can,” says Robyn Des Roches, 46, of Bethesda, a part-time museum consultant and stay-at-home mom to 5-year-old son Brian. “I’m doing the best I can and my parents did the same thing. But I envy them the simplicity they had. I feel like I have a lot more questions and doubts.”
How parenting has changed
No matter what generation we’re talking about, there is this constant: Parents love their children. “I think I am doing a better job as a parent,” says Kayla Beckert, 41, a stay-at-home mom in Montgomery Village with two preschoolers who says her dad was authoritarian and her mom was young, divorced and struggled at times. “But the thing my mom got right, the most crucial thing, was that my brother and I never doubted she loved us and would do whatever she could for us.” Adds Bethesda psychologist Barbara Ingersoll: “Parents really desperately want to do the right things for” their kids. Our parents just didn’t view it as a complicated venture like we do.
What’s changed are ideas about what is best for children, thanks to a slew of child development research. The world has changed, too—both on a macro level and right down to our streets and our living rooms. A constant media barrage—24/7 news, the Internet, advertising geared toward kids—can make life feel less safe and brings the world and all its influences, good and bad, into once-insular family life. The ripple effect is broad, from the way kids play to the toys they crave to the intense pressure we feel, particularly in affluent and well-educated places like Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Potomac—to help our kids succeed.
In the early to mid-1900s, children were considered useful, notes Bethesda psychiatrist Harold Eist. They worked the farm, took care of younger siblings, and held jobs to help support the family. After World War I, the idea of childhood as a time to play and learn grew and eventually expanded to include adolescence. After World War II, families became more child-centric, increasingly focusing on nurturing and meeting the needs of children.
“In former times,” Eist says, “it was the children’s responsibility to make parents happy, to please the parents. Now parents want their children to be happy and they want to please their children. The value of children has changed.”
The sitcoms from the ’50s and ’60s depicted parents who loved and were even amused by their children, but there was a definite pecking order. Dad went to work, but always made it home for dinner; mom stayed home and kept an impeccable house, often while wearing pearls and heels; the kids could be mischievous but, ultimately, they were obedient. “I don’t think Leave It To Beaver was ever the true story, but it did give parents a leg up,” says Cheryl Wicker, executive director of the Kensington-based Parenting Encouragement Program(PEP), which offers classes aimed at improving parent-child relationships (such as how to defuse power struggles). Television shows like that taught values like “we eat dinner together and address each other politely,” Wicker says.
Real life, of course, never was so neatly packaged nor so simple. After all, the term “generation gap” was coined in the 1960s to illustrate just how much friction and misunderstanding there could be between parents and children.
Our parents raised us during a time of great social turmoil: There were the civil rights and women’s rights movements, the Vietnam War, and a zeitgeist that rejected the “Establishment” while embracing recreational drugs, bad polyester and bad haircuts. Unlike today, however, that turmoil could be kept at arm’s length. Our parents got their news through the newspaper and half-hour nightly newscasts. There were no Internet, BlackBerries, cell phones or instant messaging to spread news or gossip in a flash. “We had the Vietnam War but there was such a sense of separation” between the news and everyday life, says Elizabeth Spencer, a licensed social worker (co-author of The Anxiety Cure for Kids) and a Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School graduate now raising two sons in Chevy Chase. “I remember in fourth grade the teachers putting up on the board where they thought ‘the bomb’ would hit [in Washington, D.C.] and the blast area. But that was all very hypothetical. We had things happening then, it just wasn’t hammered home like it is now.” Even if we were aware of bad news as children, we were more sheltered. Parents then didn’t need to talk about tough subjects with us as much, in part because there were far fewer news sources.
Today, says Spencer, “there is an endless cycling of the media and we are all online now. Our kids get bombarded.” Parents have a need to put the news in context—and explain it to their children before they hear it at school or on the playground. “I see parents struggling all the time with the line between wanting kids to know something so they can talk with their peers and not wanting to overwhelm them,” Spencer says.
‘Our parents were kind of oblivious’
When we were growing up, kids were getting into all kinds of trouble (think of all the things we want to prevent our kids from doing). But it seemed our parents didn’t worry as much as we do. “I think our parents were kind of oblivious,” laughs Molly Jackman, a Kensington mother of three. “I don’t know if there is actually more to worry about now or we just know the kind of trouble our kids can get into (after school).”
What’s one thing parents in the ’70s feared? “Drugs,” says Sheila Feldman, executive director of a Bethesda synagogue, who raised three children in Silver Spring in the 1960s and ’70s. “Children were vulnerable in those days, too, but it was a different kind of danger than today. The bigger concern today is the Internet. Will my kids be safe? Parents don’t know enough to monitor what their kids are doing. They are very vulnerable.” Then, as now, parents feared what they didn’t understand.
And if our parents did feel angst about how they were raising us, it seemed pretty well hidden—at least from a child’s point of view. “My mother-in-law told me when my husband was in kindergarten or first grade, some boys told him they were going to beat him up after school,” says Des Roches, the Bethesda stay-at-home mom. “He came home and told his mother about it. I was thinking to myself, ‘Ohmigosh, what would I do?’ I thought about all the books I’d get from the library, signing him up for tae kwon do class. But my mother-in-law told my husband,‘ You can take them on one-on-one.’ I could never do that with my child. I’d worry it would be damaging to his self-esteem. Later, she told me she hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks she was so worried about her little boy.”
While some parents confess not wanting to repeat what they see as their parents’ “mistakes”—being too strict, too hands off, being uninvolved dads—many look back and remember an at-times idyllic childhood. They had the freedom to explore their world, more moms stayed home and a parent’s word was law. “My mom opened the door in the summer and we went out [in the morning] and came back at night,” says Shellie Williams, 47, of Silver Spring, mom to 7-year-old Avery.“I had this sense of safety and the ability to roam around growing up in South Carolina. I wish my child had a very safe, sleepy neighborhood to ride his bike in and hang out in the woods and catch crawdads.”
Dietician Ann Gerber, who moved to Bethesda two years ago from Chicago with her husband and two teens, grew up one of six children in Indiana with parents she describes as strict but loving. “We all knew the rules: Respecting your parents, helping out around the house, good manners, good grades. Saturdays, we would clean. There was a lot of family camaraderie.”
Our parents typically were much more hands-off. With a few exceptions, our parents did not micromanage every moment of our day, chauffeur us endlessly, orchestrate our successes, seek our input, or even play with us much. The advantage, say child development experts, is that we had the chance to take risks, negotiate relationships and motivate ourselves—or not—without an adult standing over us telling us what to do or what to say.
“Do you know my parents never once, not once, helped me with homework or even thought of it?” says Eist. “I can remember one day I was busily working on a problem that was said to be insoluble. My mother walked in and asked what I was doing. I said it was called homework. She’d never seen it, never asked me about it. She wasn’t concerned about my performance the way we are about our kids.”
