The New York Timres looks at the parenting of “the slacker generation.”
Ann Hulbert writes (excerpt):
To judge by the study, ”baby busters” (another tag for the post-boomers) have turned into family boosters who make their elders look not exactly like slackers, but not like patient nurturers either. Reach Advisors’ 2003 survey of 3,020 parents (supplemented by their analyses of government data) found that twice as many Gen-X mothers as boomer mothers spent more than 12 hours a day ”attending to child-rearing and household responsibilities.” Roughly half of Gen-X fathers devoted three to six hours a day to domesticity; only 39 percent of baby-boomer dads could say the same. What’s more, boomers were content with their (comparatively meager) quota of kid time — unlike their successors. Who would have guessed that the supposed cynical drifters of the 1980’s would be complaining about too little time with the children? (The contrasts between parents, Reach Advisors emphasizes, do not hinge on the age of the kids.)