‘This is so hard!’ I wailed to my mum and dad, for the 39th time that day, when they kindly came to stay for a few days to help me deal with a five-month-old baby and a three-year-old while my husband went away for a week on a work trip. My eldest son was in nursery three days a week, but bedtimes and mornings were a nightmare. Getting out of the house with them seemed to take hours, and the days where I had them both all day felt relentless.
My parents looked, sympathetic, but it slowly dawned on me that they had no reason to. After all, when I was three, my dad was at home with me and my baby brother full time, with no nursery days, no grandparent support and a partner working long hours in an *actual* office (WFH was a dot on the horizon in 1986). My mum was the main breadwinner and back at work just a few weeks after my brother was born, and with very little spare cash or extra help, my dad just… got on with it.
Without soft plays centres, toddler classes, other mums nearby to commiserate with over a coffee, his job must have been infinitely harder than mine ever was. But when I suggested this to him he said ‘well… you’ve got a smaller age gap between the boys, and you were always a very easy child.’ I’m not sure either of these things are true - for one thing the age gap between my boys and myself and my brother are pretty similar. But my dad wasn’t (just) being kind - he genuinely didn’t think parenting two small children was as hard for him then as it is for me now. I have to say I agree, but why?
For starters, what it means to be a parent has totally changed. This year, psychologist Penelope Leach re-issued her classic book, Your Baby & Child, first published in 1977 to better reflect modern parenting. The reasons she gave were myriad - from new evidence around bed sharing and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome to the ever-evolving makeup of the modern family. Mothers are much more likely to be working full time than ever before, similarly Leach notes that child centredness has increased in many households, with parents ‘focusing much of their time and energy focusing on their [children’s] wellbeing.’
She’s not wrong - a 2012 study conducted by the University of California found that parents a decade ago spent twice as much time each day playing with their children than they did in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the number of mothers in work in the UK reached 75.6% June-April 2021, the highest level ever. In short - we are doing more active parenting than we’ve ever done before, with less time to do it in.
Psychologist Anna Mathur points out that there are all sorts of practical differences that mean our lives as parents are hugely different now to previous generations, from support networks, financial challenges, work boundaries, the way we conduct friendships to the amount of knowledge we have around parenting.
We are overwhelmed with knowledge
'We have so much information at our fingertips. In seconds we can research every parenting tool and potential symptom for any illness discovered. Whilst this may in some cases, quite literally save lives and positively impact our parenting, we are often overwhelmed by knowledge. Whilst the pursuit of knowledge can ease anxiety, it can also cause anxiety. Back then, if you needed advice you were more likely to seek it from a friend or family member, or maybe a doctor. But while fewer sources of information can lead to a lack of answers, it also means less confusion and anxiety.'
There’s another obvious suggestion that we put too much pressure on ourselves. From the cult of the Insta mum (if your baby isn’t photographed in a perfectly co-ordinated oatmeal outfit in their minimalist beige nursery, are you even parenting?) to the very idea that parenting is now a verb - a thing we activity do, rather than something that just sort of happens around us. Christmas is a case in point - when I was a child we might have made one visit to see Santa in a shopping centre grotto. In contrast my son’s (aged 3 and 7 months) have been on a month-long programme of festive events, visits, classes and concerts. My exhausted toddler is now perennially on the verge of a breakdown and I’m broke and knackered, but I can’t stop booking them in, driven by a mix of guilt, FOMO and a desire to leave the house and see some other people.
'I often encourage clients to ask themselves what they would do/not do if nobody knew!’ Says Anna. 'Would they book that Christmas event? Would they make different parenting choices? It’s a way of stripping back the people-pleasing need, to listen to the needs of yourself and your family. Sometimes we can be so used to following the crowd that we don’t realise we are going against our own values or overlooking our own needs. '
I also wonder if sometimes our parents are misremembering their own parenting experiences. Your brain does funny things to when you have children. Perhaps viewing their own parenting experiences with rose-tinted spectacles is the only way our parents can gear themselves up for round two with the grandkids. A friend’s mum expressed surprise at just how much playing her three-year-old son expected her to do with him on any given day. ‘So you just… have to play with him, with his toys?,’ she asked. ‘You just used to get on with it yourself.’ My friend doesn’t for a minute think this is strictly true - but maybe the reality is somewhere in the middle. Maybe there was less expectation on her mum to actively play with her than she feels with her own son, less concern that she’d be ‘bored’ or ‘under stimulated,’ so she was left to it. And maybe her mum also spent hours and hours playing slightly convoluted make-believe games with her, but she’s blocked that tedium out completely.
Another friend with an 18-month-old and a very demanding job doesn’t remember her mum doing much in the way of active playing with her at all: ‘I don’t remember clubs or groups, just being tossed out in the garden with my cousins till dinner time - we’d never let our kids just play outside in the same way.’ That said, as her father worked away a lot, she doesn’t really believe her mum had it any easier on a practical level, but thinks we just expect so much more of ourselves now. ‘We expect so much of ourselves in all our roles - we’ve got to have a great job, our kids have got to be in a homemade outfit for World Book Day we’ve got to have whipped up a sourdough loaf in time for breakfast, before making time to see our friends and read that book. It’s made worse because it all plays out on social media and then we feel guilty because we didn’t meet the unrealistic standards we set ourselves. It’s exhausting.’
Anna points out that what we see on Instagram is a 2D version of people’s lives - we might see all the Christmas activities for their children, but we won’t have seen how exhausted they’d have been afterwards, the child having a meltdown on the way home, or the blazing row they had with their equally exhausted partner the next day. 'We see the snapshot; we don’t see the cost. We are hardwired to believe what we see, and if we don’t know someone’s ‘behind the scenes’, we can believe it doesn’t exist.’
And the answer? Anna suggests going back to basics and reconsidering what’s important to you as a family. 'Life will sweep you up, fill your diary and find you doubting yourself. Consider 4-5 family values. What is important to you all? What would you like to underpin the decisions you make? When you find yourself facing a decision, revisit your value and see how you can respond in a way that is in line with them.’
There are many elements of parenting in the 1980s that can probably go in the bin – passive smoking, smacking and my grandad’s unfortunate habit of sticking a finger covered in brandy in the mouth of a crying baby are all a case in point. But parenting for your family rather than for Instagram sounds pretty sensible, actually.