A strange topic, but the Wall Street Journal broached it in its Mother’s Day edition on March 9. The feature was what the Journal termed “the Beta Mom.” That’s a mother of a minor child who has decided she doesn’t need to beat her quarterly sales quota at work while assuring that children are honor role and lettered varsity athletes.

I grew up in the 1960s. My mom stayed home until I finished elementary school. The menu of non-school activities available was baseball and boy scouts. Vacation was one week in Cape May. I took clarinet lessons because my father owned a clarinet. My college and law school cost about $35,000, all-in. Today, that’s the sticker price of one semester.

I chose not to have kids but in four decades of practice I was amazed by the range and expense of activities available to “modern” children. I have written about how fathers have really stepped up in the world of parenting. But, even in today’s world the division of household and child service responsibilities (doctors, dentists, clothing and laundry) most women still carry 80% of the burden. Part of that is often a control issue. Women are often sold on the idea that only they can do these things right.

I recently prepared an article for another publication on the history of family law since colonial times. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of 18th century childhood was how indifferent parents were to their kids. Unless you were born to wealth, you lived at home until age 5 if a girl, 7 if a boy. At that point you were “sold off” as a laborer to a family that “employed” you in exchange for room and board. Better off parents might arrange for some education and defer apprenticeship, but even Ben Franklin was pulled out of Boston Latin at age 12 and sent to apprentice for his brother as a printer. Eli Whitney was working in his father’s nail manufactory at 14.  Affluent children were raised “upstairs” by servants and would never have been the center of any parent’s attention unless they were near death.

Even in these harsh circumstances family bonds were kept. That may have been because there were no social or economic safety nets except for families. Strangers banged on doors everyday asking if you needed candles or had any food to spare. If it was a “family member” you might share some food, if you had any to spare.

That world sounds unduly harsh. But it produced the America we live in today including successful people like Franklin and Whitney. Meanwhile, the first time I testified before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives on family related topics in 2016, I was preceded by a father who claimed he had bankrupted himself trying to promote his son’s career as a baseball player. As you might suspect, that did not work out. I had witnessed clients doing similar things, not realizing that the aspirations can become all consuming and impose major stress on parents and children. It seems in our quest to maximize childhood, we may have taken away much of the fun and adventure which modest activities can grant to us.

You can read the Wall Street Journal and conclude that dads can do more. And that is probably true. But parenting is really more about guiding in contrast to providing. We have lots of data showing that while adults struggle to “provide” kids are feeling stress. Data and Statistics on Children’s Mental Health | Children’s Mental Health | CDC

Perhaps, we should all have a discussion about the merits of Type B parenting.

An afternote: Many years ago I was transporting the late Gerald Cooke, Psy.D. from a seminar we had presented in Harrisburg on divorce and custody. This was the advent of the days of paternal engagement in child-rearing and I was curious how that area of conflict had evolved. To paraphrase Dr. Cooke: “{M]en have been socialized to be the breadwinners and career-seekers. When a family ruptures in a separation, men often realize that they have sacrificed golden years of parenting (0-6) and aspire to catch up. That’s why the dad who couldn’t name the pediatric dentist now wants to be at a routine cleaning. Moms often don’t respond well. ‘Where have you been for the past six years?’ The joint engagement can be good but it doesn’t start out that way”