Many a times I feel mothers of this generation are looked upon as someone who doesn't really know how to look after a kid or at times people have this stereotypic thinking that younger generation women have more important things in life than family. I was exposed to this for the first time when I went for my ninth month check up and my gynec was discussing with the co-doctor "What do women do these days, they just sit and watch TV all day and never get tired of it". I was so shocked to hear that, especially because I was managing cooking and office work till I went to my native and till a week before I delivered our darling, I was working from home. I know there are so many women out there who manage household chores, office work, look after kids and indeed they are super moms. Then why do certain people only try to label new gen moms like they just don't do anything.
This really kept me thinking and I came up with a couple of points that reassured me that we are doing a great job.
Nuclear families - Multi tasking: Earlier it was mostly joint families and there were so many people in the house that work got divided among them but we being in the generation of nuclear families, are bound to more responsibilities like we have to balance home, job, kids all by ourselves. Indeed most of us have maids to do the cleaning but then that gives us a little more space to concentrate on other responsibilities.
Access to information: We have easy access to the world wide web and hence we really don't have to depend on people for advice. As for me babycenter is my bible to bringing up our son and whoever tries to correct me I always have a scientific explanation to why we are doing it that way.
We make them independent: What I learnt after becoming a mom is that freaking out for everything would only make things worse. The mommy instinct has always worked for me. Up to an extend, leave your baby to explore things on his own, they too need their "me-time." By doing so we are only encouraging them to learn things. I feel nuclear families bring up more independent kids as we try not to fuss them for every single thing, we give them their space (at times so that we will get that break too :)).
Change is mutual: Somehow it is like our baby changes a lot of our behaviour than we changing theirs. For example we know that a little one has all eyes and ears on his papa and mama and will mainly imbibe character from how we behave hence we automatically become more careful about the words we use and discard unhealthy behavior just so that they don't learn it from us. This in a way makes us better people and lets our child learn things on his own without imposing our thoughts on them.
You often have to listen to things like "he is not going to sit on his booster chair after he's one!", "why do you want to keep him restricted in a car seat?", " poor baby is made to sleep in his bed alone". So in those situations just pat on your back and tell yourself that you are doing a good job and I'm sure you little one will prove you right at every stage of their life.
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