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Grandmothers are watching in horror as their children turn into over-ambitious, competitive parents with pampered, demanding offspring, says a report into how women's experience of motherhood has changed over the generations.
Baby-boomers who brought up children in a time when they say they were allowed to just "get on with it" claim their daughters are being put under huge pressure to rigidly control everything in their own babies' lives, from food intake and exercise to after-school Mandarin lessons.
"Women who became mothers in the 1950s to 1970s recalled a time when mothering was more taken for granted and they just 'got on with it'," said the UK's Open University Professor Rachel Thomson, co-director of The Making of Modern Motherhood report.
"They didn't recognise the modern pressure and compulsion on parents to be constantly busy and sociable, taking their children to every class available, being up to date on endless independent research into everything from developmental goals to nutrition, while also balancing work and family."
She found that grandmothers believed the range of choices available to their daughters not only turned mothering into a competition, but also undermined their daughters' confidence in their ability to care for their children.
"The gains offered by this story of progress were dwarfed by the losses in the grandmothers' eyes," she said, "including the creation of demanding babies and an intensification of the rhythms of daily life."
Thomson interviewed mothers as they prepared for the birth of their first child. She then met them a year later, when she also interviewed their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, as well as partners, friends and families.
Vikki White, head of marketing at the Mothers' Union, was sceptical of the findings.
"These are very middle-class concerns. Modern mothers are stressed by their work-life balance, by the size of their mortgages and by the blame that's piled on them over the negative bits of youth culture. But I don't think many are stressed by the choice of whether to take their child to baby massage or baby yoga classes."
But Juliet Chalk, a mother of two young boys, agreed with the report.
"Mothers who have been used to taking on the responsibilities of a demanding career have a tendency to approach parenting in the same way. I did it myself with my first child: I endlessly researched the most up-to-date developmental targets and set goals and deadlines for my children.
"The pressure on mothers to behave like this hugely increases the stress of parenting. We would be far better going back to when we didn't feel we had to fill up our children's time with endless classes and distractions."
Thomson also found that daughters disagreed with their mothers over the pressures of modern parenting.
Women who had their first babies between 26 and 35 and were more socially mobile than their mothers, admitted in the interviews that they paid little attention to their mothers' fears.
"Instead of turning to their mothers, they relied on peers, books, websites and modern experts. They relished all the choices open to them, believing it all helped them create happy, stimulated children."
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