Boomer knows best? Not so fast, say millennial parents | Canada Voices

Neither mother nor daughter arrived in a good mood that day.

It was the end of summer, 2019, at their local park in a suburb north of Toronto. They set out for their walk, the smell of cut grass oppressive in the sticky, sweaty heat. Kathryn Ross was just a few weeks postpartum, pushing her baby boy in a stroller. She was irritable and anxious from exhaustion and sleeplessness. Every day and night unfolded exactly like the last. The demands never-ending.

Seeing Kathryn like this made her mother, Norma Oda, anxious, too. She wanted to help Kathryn, who was her baby. But everything she said seemed to irritate Kathryn further. “I felt,” she said, “like her punching bag.”

Up until that summer, Kathryn, now 36 and Norma, 65, often described themselves to others as that rare unicorn: mother and daughter, but also best friends. Growing up in Markham, Ont., Kathryn had lots of friends, but still often chose to hang out with her mom. At Kathryn’s wedding, Norma was a bridesmaid. Even as an adult, Kathryn still called her mom almost every day.

But as mother and daughter walked through the park that afternoon, the conversation was perfunctory. How are feedings going? Fine. Are you getting any sleep? Barely.

About midway through the walk, Kathryn broke the news. We’ve decided to take a trip to Quebec, she said. Her husband’s family lived there, and they wanted to meet the baby. They’d talked about it, decided it was the right thing to do.

Norma was startled. She and Kathryn had discussed a potential Quebec visit before, and the challenges of taking a six-week-old baby on an eight-hour road trip. About how hard it would be. It’s too much, too soon, she told Kathryn. A bad idea.

Kathryn nodded her head. She understood this. She was nervous, too. It would be hard, she said. Still, it was important to them. They would figure out a way to make it work.

But Norma was still shaking her head. The baby, she said. It’s not good for the baby.

That’s when the dam burst. “It had been building, building, building, and then just hit a peak,” said Kathryn. It was one of the worst fights they had ever had. Afterward, said Norma, “I just went home in tears.”

The trip came and went, but for weeks the pair went without speaking. No calls or visits.

Eventually, Kathryn reached out to her mom. They made up. But the next months and years would see more skirmishes. They argued about sleep schedules and swaddling. Later, the fights were about discipline, sugar and screen time. Clashes around how best to raise the young child.

Norma would make comments, or offer advice. Kathryn would bristle. Between the two generations, between Norma and Kathryn, it kept coming down to the same question: Mother knows best, but which one?

It’s a situation that many families will recognize. As millennials – now between the ages of 29 and 44 – move into their prime childbearing years, they’re adjusting to their new role as parents. But the approach they’re taking is not the same as the baby boomers’. Some 88 per cent of millennial parents say they’re choosing to parent differently than how they were raised. And it’s causing all kinds of friction.

Spend any time in a parent group chat, or at a pickleball court, and you’ll soon hear the many grievances. Social media is rife with complaints. Millennials vent about out-of-touch boomer grandparents, either overbearing and intrusive, or selfish and unwilling to help. Baby boomer grandparents gripe about clueless, overly gentle millennial parents who act like they’re reinventing the wheel.

What we’re seeing is the consequence of a massive shift taking place all around the world: the two largest demographics – millennials and baby boomers – simultaneously transitioning into brand new stages of life. And when you listen closely, when you put the petty grumblings aside and distill the disputes down to what they’re really about, you realize that it’s a conversation that goes far beyond the trenches of raising young children. It’s not just a conflict about parenting, but about what we value as people. About what’s important to us, as humans, to pass on to the next generation.

Before gentle parenting, and free-range parenting, and tiger and helicopter parenting – before we worried about attachment styles and how the first weeks of our baby’s lives might impact them decades into the future – there was only survival.

A century ago, parents in North America were living through the second Industrial Revolution. Babies were born into cramped, often unsafe and unsanitary conditions, with little access to health care or medicine. In Canada, where about one in 10 children died before the age of one, the focus for many parents was just on keeping kids alive.

Until then, parenting had been the realm of women. But the high rates of child mortality prompted “experts” to get involved – government officials, doctors and other professionals who began to prescribe rigid routines for children and their parents.

The emphasis at the time was single-minded, said Linda Quirke, a sociology professor from Wilfrid Laurier University: “The focus was on children’s bodies.” In the rare instance that experts weighed in on a child’s social or emotional development, she said, it was to emphasize rigour and discipline.

“Never hug and kiss them,” wrote John Watson, an American psychologist and prominent parenting expert of the time. To show affection was to coddle or spoil them. Emotions were a sign of weakness. He advised mothers to shake hands with their children instead.

Mr. Watson’s beliefs about the importance of strict, authoritarian parenting were still dominant in the post-Second World War period, as the baby boomers were raised. Since then, parenting ideologies have shifted, changed, evolved. But the long tail of this history explains many of the conflicts we’re now seeing.

Advice from a baby boomer grandparent – to let a newborn baby cry it out, for instance – might seem cruel to a millennial parent. But it may simply be a grandparent passing down what they learned in their own childhood.

Things began to shift after the 1960s. Family structures were still built around hierarchy, but scientists were increasingly learning about how children’s brains develop and learn from a very young age.

“By the time we get into the 60s, said Prof. Quirke, “it was about children’s brains.”

The popularity of Benjamin Spock, a.k.a. “Dr. Spock,” further nudged parents in a more permissive direction. He advised parents to loosen up – to trust their own instincts, and allow their children some affection.

By the 1980s, the baby boomers were the parents. The dominant ideology was still authoritarian. But around them, the world was changing. Women were increasingly entering the workforce. There was “stranger danger.” Economic inequality was growing and parents feared what their children’s futures might look like.

“There were all these various kinds of anxieties that began to circulate around what it means when women work and how parents should parent their children,” said Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta. Experts emerged to address those concerns, writing books and in magazines claiming to have answers for raising the best, most successful children for this uncertain future.

This was the beginning of “intensive parenting,” said Prof. Strohschein. Parents increasingly saw themselves as the sole architects of their childrens’ lives, responsible entirely for their eventual failure or success. They fixated on extracurricular activities and after-school education. They became “helicopter parents” or “snow plow” parents, who cleared the path ahead to prevent any potential stumble.

Which brings us to the current moment: millennial parenting.

Despite the conflicts between the generations, Prof. Quirke said millennials are in many ways simply finishing what the baby boomers started. They still believe that parenting should be an active role; if anything, they’ve intensified intensive parenting.

But they’re living in an era of, arguably, even more anxiety. There was the COVID-19 pandemic. A tumultuous global economy. Climate change. And then there’s the internet and social media – countless influencers and online experts who create unrealistic, oftentimes confusing expectations.

Exit Dr. Spock, enter Dr. Becky.

Rebecca Kennedy, an American psychologist whose online advice has earned her the title of “millennial parenting whisperer,” has emerged as the new voice of authority. Her approach can be loosely described as gentle parenting, but with, as she calls them, “sturdy boundaries.”

Her main appeal to overwhelmed millennials is that she guides parents to approach both their child and themselves with empathy. Kid having a tantrum? Instead of punishing or shushing the child, Ms. Kennedy advises parents to try to understand their child’s feelings, and to help them navigate those feelings. Her emphasis is on resilience and emotional regulation. On the relationship between parent and child.

This approach, of course, appeals to millennials – one of the most therapized generations ever – many of whom feel that their own emotional needs weren’t prioritized during childhood.

As each successive generation carries forward, pushes against and builds upon the previous generation’s parenting, it’s tempting to view these changes through the lens of progress. Millennials certainly think so. The 2024 Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago study, which found that most millennial parents are parenting differently from previous generations, also found that 73 per cent of them think they’re parenting better than previous generations.

As if scaling Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the focus of each successive generation has been to climb up another rung: from the basic physiological concerns of early 20th century childrearing, to the preoccupations with safety and economic stability by baby boomers in the 1980s, to millennial parents now, with their focus on self-esteem. On love and belonging.

It’s tempting to expect, using this lens, that within another generation or two, we’ll reach the pinnacle of Maslow’s triangle into a kind of collective self-actualization.

Except, of course, things are never that simple. Especially when you factor in considerations like gender, race and class.

While child care in this country still falls disproportionately on women (Statistics Canada shows women spend, on average, 52 hours a week on unpaid child care, compared with 30 hours for men), these generational differences still put distinct pressures on men.

As millennial fathers try to parent differently from their own parents, that push for change can be complicated by expectations around masculinity, said James Smith, a 42-year-old dad from Vancouver.

“Many of us grew up with dads who were emotionally distant or expected to be the disciplinarians and breadwinners,” he said. And now, as men become more involved, “nobody is showing the dads how to be better dads. We just have to ‘man up’ and figure it out.”

And then there’s the fact that many of the most popular parenting methods – the standards upon which many of us judge our performance as parents – are based off of research that’s historically focused around white, middle-class and upper-class families.

“All of these questions are really exacerbated by one’s own culture and upbringing,” said Judith Bernhard, a professor of early childhood studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. This can be especially complicated for newcomer or immigrant families.

She gave the example of sleep training – coaching a baby to sleep on their own – as an idea popular in North America because of the emphasis here on independence and getting parents back to work. But in many Latin American cultures, where the focus is on spending time together as a family, she said it’s common for children to share a bed with parents, or stay up later into the night.

Class, too, plays an important role, she said. For example: Whether to spoon-feed your child, or to let them explore (and potentially waste) food on their own? “That’s cultural, but it’s also class.”

After all, a single parent or a parent living on a low income – regardless of generation – might not have the same amount of time or energy to devote to more intensive parenting approaches. And a parent who is struggling to survive is not likely to be preoccupied with self-actualization.

And then there’s the fact that, when we talk about generations, what we’re really talking about is people. Mothers and daughters. Fathers and sons. Each of them unique individuals, with their own histories, their own perspectives, their own relationship dynamics.

The way Norma raised Kathryn in the 1980s was in itself a reaction to the way she was raised in the 1960s. Norma’s own parents were strict. On a few occasions, her mother made hurtful comments that stuck with her well into adulthood. So while Norma may have seemed strict to Kathryn, it was still gentle in comparison to the way she was raised.

“You just try,” said Norma, “to make improvements from what you grew up with.”

Norma can quickly summarize a few of the aspects of millennial parenting that she has, over the years, taken issue with.

On gadgets and apps: “Excessive.” On lack of discipline: “There need to be consequences.” On foregoing a strict sleep routine: “100 per cent, frankly, ridiculous.”

And it’s not just parenting. On the subjects of millennials, the conversation quickly veers into “kids these days” territory. She thinks many – not all – of them are materialistic and obsessed with social media and keeping up with the Joneses. Too preoccupied with “Me Time.” Too precious.

But underneath her bravado was also something else. Hurt feelings. A sense of rejection by her daughter.

From Norma’s perspective, she’d raised three great kids. She wasn’t perfect, but she thought she’d been a good mom. So it was hard to see Kathryn criticize or brush off the advice she gave. Hard not to feel like she’d been made obsolete.

“I am an older person, but I do have experience to offer,” she said. Parenting from her generation, she said, “isn’t all outdated.”

But Kathryn, too, was hurt. She was learning how to be a parent, and needed her mom’s support. “It felt like a lack of confidence. It really made me question myself.”

She also didn’t feel that her mom grasped how much things had changed.

We understand in 2025, for instance, that babies should sleep on their backs. That they should be introduced to potential allergens early. That they should use car seats.

And Kathryn’s life, too, is different than Norma’s. Norma raised her kids in the 90s as a stay-at-home mom. Kathryn and her husband both work full-time. And they’re living in a time where expenses in their city have skyrocketed.

The role of grandparents has changed as well. Life expectancy is far higher today than it was even two generations ago (from about 59 for men and 61 for women in the 1920s to about 80 for men and 84 for women). Grandparents today are healthier and wealthier than they’ve ever been.

“They’re rewriting their roles,” said University of Alberta’s Prof. Strohschein. Some want to devote all of their time to the grandkids – especially given the declining birth rate, they have fewer of them than ever before. But others, she said, don’t want that burden. “They might think, ‘I was a parent before. I don’t want to be a parent again.’”

It’s not that things today are harder, said Kathryn. But they are different.

“She is a great mom,” Kathryn said of Norma. “But I’m not the same person. I’m not living the same life.”

Understanding those differences might just be the key to easing some of the tensions.

Joys Anderson, a 72-year-old from Langley, B.C., said there’s a clear difference between how she raised her daughter in the 1980s, and how her daughter is now raising her granddaughter. And the difference, she said, is in values. Different goals.

For Ms. Anderson, who was a single mom, her focus was, above all else, on efficiency. “It was ‘We’ve got to get to daycare, we’ve got to get through breakfast, gotta get your clothes on,’” she said. “It was all transactional stuff.”

But with her daughter, “the goal is her daughter’s mental health. Her daughter’s sense of self-respect and understanding. Of knowing she has choices, and that she’s safe, and that her parents love her,” she said.

She said she doesn’t see the different approach as a rejection of her own parenting. “I think it’s absolutely lovely.”

Over time, Norma and Kathryn have found a new dynamic. Norma is, once again, one of the people Kathryn calls on the most. They’ve both learned from their arguments and experiences. Both made changes to their behaviour.

Kathryn has learned to loosen the reins, especially since having her second son. “I realized I had to let go of some of the control I was holding.”

And Norma has learned to let Kathryn figure things out for herself. “If I could do it all over again, I would just stand back, and only offer advice when I was asked,” she said. “And otherwise, mind my own business.”

The boys, now ages 3 and 5, recently slept over at Norma’s for the first time. Norma called ahead to run through her plans, what she would be feeding them. She was thinking of playing this movie for them, and was that okay?

“Just like I had my journey figuring out motherhood, she had her journey figuring out how to be a grandmother,” said Kathryn.

A cousin recently had her first baby. It was Kathryn’s first lesson in what her own future might look like. For when she becomes a grandparent herself.

The cousin was talking to her about sleep, she said. She was worried about the baby’s nap schedule. She’d started using an app to track sleep.

“I wanted so bad to be like, ‘You don’t need to do that,’” said Kathryn. Instead, she just smiled and nodded.

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