With a slightly frantic quality in her voice, she said that, were it not for this mommy group, she would not have known that she HAD to have this toy or that toy, this product or that product for her child…or…well. She felt so “thankful!” for the group (while my own reaction at the description was to feel cell-bound).

I was exhausted listening to the jd/mba/md/phd new mom as she described almost desperately trying to choose the “right” toy for her child so they would both “belong.” (And I wondered, could she be the product of helicopter parents, herself? Could she be substituting this moms’ group for micro-parenting that she misses?).

That brief view into the new moms’ group made me feel relieved to be at the stage when we have almost navigated the whitewater rapids of daily parenting, and, at times, the whitewater rapids of other parents’ opinions. (Our children are a 24-year-old daughter who is feeling her way through the early career-building years and a 16-year-old newly licensed son who is getting ready to choose his college, his portal on the work world soon).

As I drove home I felt a great deal of gratitude that my mother taught me to make toy giraffe decisions on my own.

There’s a great book by Neil Howe and William Strauss called “13th Gen: Abort, Retry or Fail?” that does a great job of outlining many of the issues that shaped child-rearing in the 70s and made it different than many other eras (http://www.amazon.com/13th-Gen-Abort-Retry-Ignore/dp/0679743650)

In a nutshell, we (and I am around your age, although the oldest of all my cousins) were the abandoned generation – the solid suburbs of the fifties and sixties were crumbling and things like divorce and women returning to work, plus an ongoing recession. meant that kids were no longer the focus of what was going on in America. We were secondary at some level. Which meant that we had a great deal of freedom and a whole lot of beta or even gamma moms. Not too many alphas.

I find the lack of downtime in my kids lives a bit troubling. A lot of lessons were learned trying to sort out a pack of 20 kids into two kickball teams without any adults around. That doesn’t happen anymore.

But returning to the 70s, I was watching “Bad News Bears” (the original) with my son the other day. He thought it was a very racy movie, what with the cursing and drinking and fairly frank sexual discussions. And it struck me that I was around his age when that movie came out and it was just another kids movie at the time. Nothing notable about the raciness of the content.

That about sums it up.

Now with the internet, blogs, ecommerce, we are much more aware of things that our parents were. They saw Leave It To Beaver and Mary Tyler More and that was it. They were sold a carefully crafted media and marketing vision of what ‘they should be’.

I think that Beta mom’s were pioneers of their day, much like the Mommy Bloggers of today. There are talk shows, reality tv, and so much other media that shows us that there are so many kinds of people out there and although we are carefully marketed to in this day and age, we are much more likely to challenge that ‘perfect world’ scenario when it is presented to us.

I don’t think mommy’s have changed, I think our access to information has changed.

Love this post!

Vicky H

I too had tremendous freedom, yet my mom was, and still is, an alpha mom. She raised us in troublesome times…1960s-early 70s with free love, drugs and rock & roll. (One of my brothers was kicked out of college – the same one every member of our father’s family had attended since it began one – for growing and selling pot. That was an interesting time.)

I thrived on the freedom I experienced growing up, yet in the midst of that freedom there was some pretty strict structure in place.

My father fought in the Pacific during the second world war…my parents were both born before the depression. My life converged at a cross point of several worlds.

I wish I could give my children what I had…the safety to run around with my friends from 3pm until sundown, the joy of no real homework until Jr. High (7th grade), getting my license @ 15!!!!! No real after school activities or play dates…we rode bikes clear across town if we wanted to get together with our friends who did not live in the neighborhood. NO crazy traffic to test our mortality, or nut job child molesters living within our zip code.

But also, I wish I could teach them, without the interference of their peers and their peers’ parents, that family is first, more is not better, adults often do know better…home, country and work in that order…that was how I was raised…nothing came before family…ever. As a family we discussed what was going on around us that effected our world…the war, which was not really a war, Watergate, the gas crisis which brought lines we waited in to fill up the station wagon, etc.

We read the newspaper and talked about the news – the summer b/t fourth and fifth grade was a crazy time…hours upon hours discussing Nixon, his cronies, their crimes and how that would forever change our world…never could we trust a politician again.

So, no Tom Collins for my mom…although my glass of red wine at the end of the day does wonders for moi! She was attentive, loving, challenging, and demanding, aware yet not at times, a big time queen bee, reading more and knowing more than most other mothers, much more in-tune with what was going on in the world around her, and the wretchedly unfair differences b/t men and women. I am not embarrassed that my mom was an alpha mom.

She was a great role model. A college graduate at 20…yes…try living up to that..received her grad degree as she closed in on 70. All that and she has not held a real job since 1960. She is just interested in developing herself for the pure joy of it.

BTW, having a truly evolved father helped ease the pain of having the perfect mother…she was not our nurturer, although she was loving….he was and while she has never said I am sorry, he made up for it by being man enough to admit when he was wrong. I find myself clearly in the middle…I am a cross b/t the alpha and the beta, and I like that! I want my children to live up to their fullest potential, but I don’t want them to be adults before their time. While they have rules they must follow, behaviors that are expected, I always admit when I am wrong and I have said I am sorry more times than I can count.

I found this baby troubleshooting manual very appealing. Not sure what that says about my own potential as a mother.

http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Owners-Manual-Instructions-Trouble-Shooting/dp/1931686238/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213237777&sr=8-1

In the course of the last several centuries, take any 25-year chunk of time, and two things are always true: 1) Things are getting better and 2) everyone thinks they’re getting worse.

Not sure if that’s exactly right, but an interesting thought, on the balance.