Most of the adults of my generation were raised in some version of a "children should be seen and not heard" era. Boy, have times changed. Contemporary children are growing up in an environment where children should be seen, talked to, validated, encouraged, supported, and developed. They have gone from being quietly kept in the background to being loudly and proudly paraded into the foreground. In many households, it's the parents who are seen and not heard, and children are the axis upon which the household turns.

My wife and I were as guilty of this as any contemporary parent. When our children were young, our living room looked like a display center for a Toys-R-Us outlet. Lego sets and Lincoln Log constructions dotted the floor like an architectural layout for a dilapidated shopping center. Our refrigerator was transformed into a display case for finger paintings and doily cutouts. Spellings and misspellings of words from multicolored magnetic plastic alphabets competed with macaroni and paste compositions of turkeys, flowers, and semi-deranged faces. And that was just the front. The side was (and remains) a freestanding magnet-reinforced album of their three lives starting from birth-to-the present, gradually occupying more and more space until every time we put a new picture up, an avalanche of history risks cascading to the floor.

The New Era of the Child
Our culture's shift towards children's well-being has dramatically affected our identity as men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. At the same time, changes in the economy, marriage, and divorce have created confusion and turmoil about who's supposed to do what with the house and the kids. This chapter will examine the many ways in which the burden of these changes have fallen onto women's shoulders, and what may need to change in your household for your partner to do more, and for you to do less.

We are today cursed and blessed by an unprecedented amount of information that any parent can now get at any time to answer any question they could ever have about any of their children. Internet web sites, newspaper articles, and whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to serving this eager and anxious population. Magazines with titles such as Child, Parenting, Pregnancy, Pregnancy and Baby, Babytalk, TWINS, Mommy Too, and Working Mother, to name a few, testify to this insatiable parenting market.

On the one hand, this increase in information and awareness has relieved suffering for millions of families. For example, the relatively recent ability to pinpoint such problems as learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, Asperger's syndrome, and countless other psychological and educational disabilities have positively changed the lives of millions of adults and their children.

In addition, easy-to-access information has made the sometimes heartbreaking and confusing journey of parenting, a far less brambled path.

However, with education comes guilt and fear of doing the dreaded "wrong thing." As parents, we're terrified of blowing it. A distraught mother recently said to me, "Last night I lost my patience with my two year-old and bawled him out for the first time. I don't usually do that, but I'm worried that I scarred him for life." Worries that some small parental loss of control will result in long-term damage is a common concern that I hear on a daily basis in my psychotherapy practice.