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.

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.

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