“It’s my mother-in-law again,” begins the text, and I know exactly what’s coming. For the other Millennial mothers I know, conflict with their own parents, or the parents of their partners, almost always follows exactly the same script.
“She thinks she knows everything because she gave birth once upon a time,” the message will go. “But she just doesn’t understand how things are done now.”
“It’s my mother-in-law again,” begins the text, and I know exactly what’s coming. For the other Millennial mothers I know, conflict with their own parents, or the parents of their partners, almost always follows exactly the same script.
“She thinks she knows everything because she gave birth once upon a time,” the message will go. “But she just doesn’t understand how things are done now.”
“Millennials are served a constant stream of content”
I’m a Millennial mum, and I can absolutely see where my friends are coming from.
More than any generation before us, Millennials are bombarded with parenting content on social media. Where our parents’ or grandparents’ generations would need to intentionally select – and actually read – a parenting book to learn more about how to parent, Millennials are served a constant stream of content on how to be “better” parents.
On any given day, I can open Instagram or TikTok and learn about attachment styles, baby-led weaning, positive approaches to toddler meltdowns, how to safely co-sleep, common pitfalls when baby-proofing apartments with stairs, and what lollies pose the biggest choking risk for my toddler on Halloween.
And that’s just what’s delivered to me unprompted – if I want to find out more about boosting my breastmilk supply, I literally have the entire history of human knowledge on the topic in the palm of my hand.
“It’s probably true”
Let’s face it – it’s probably true that Millennials know more about parenting than the generations that came before them.
For one thing, science is always developing, and new research is coming out all the time. Take, for example, what our parents knew as SIDS and we now call SUDI. Researchers know more about the causes, and have put stricter safe sleep guidelines in place – things that I know for a fact my own parents didn’t do with me or my brother.
Millennials know a lot about being parents, because they have access to a whole lot of information about being parents. It’s no longer the case that the only available parenting role models are a person’s own parents – in fact, in my experience, many Millennials are actively trying to give their kids a different kind of childhood to their own.
Which is why it doesn’t surprise me at all that a US study done earlier this year found that 73% of Millennials think they’re better parents than their own parents. I don’t need a study to tell me what I’m already hearing from all my friends – as far as my generation is concerned, we’re doing a better job of parenting than our own (sometimes misinformed, sometimes just disinterested) parents.
When I ask my friends for specifics, the range of things their parents know “nothing” about is broad. Safe sleep comes up a lot, as does baby proofing and starting solids.
“My mum still gasps every time I give my baby a piece of food, even though I’ve told her hundreds of times that bigger is safer,” a friend from my mother’s group tells me. “I know she’s just giving my baby purees when I’m out of the house.”
Another friend confesses she’s hesitant to leave her child for sleepovers with her mother in law because she forgoes the approved sleep-suit in favour of blankets she used on her own kids.
And I’ve lost count of the number of times that mothers I know have complained to me that their kids’ grandparents don’t “get” the attachment parenting style they’re trying so hard to cultivate.
“Reinvented the parenting wheel”
But here’s the thing: Millennials think they’ve reinvented the parenting wheel. And I think they’re being arrogant and patronising.
Of course it’s ultimately up to an individual parent how they want to raise their kids, but the trend I’m seeing – where my friends are dismissing the lived experience of their parents’ generation in favour of something they’ve seen in a snappy Instagram reel – seems ill-informed.
If I’ve got two young kids, and my parents have two adult kids, I’m happy to admit they’ve done more parenting than I have: that’s just maths.
And while Millennials might reflect, as adults, on the mistakes their parents made when they were younger, it’s worth noting that our own kids aren’t yet old enough to tell us everything we’ve done wrong.
So maybe, in the meantime, it’s worth keeping our opinions on how great we are to ourselves.
