Child rearing: why parents feel so inept.

Are today's parents worried that they're not up to the job? Are they afraid of their own kids? Is the experience of parenthood itself to be dreaded or even avoided?

To judge by one of television's new reality shows, Supernanny, the answers to all three questions would have to be yes. This addition to ABC's Monday evening schedule features screaming, back-talking, and tantrum-throwing preschoolers who have taken over the household. Meanwhile, their intimidated parents wander around spacious suburban homes in a daze. The mothers, who have chosen to be at home with the kids, sob that they are "bad" mothers. The fathers listlessly tune out. The kids wheedle and manipulate. One five-year-old girl, running wild during a trip to the grocery store, stops long enough to offer her mother a deal: "I'll be good if you buy me a doughnut." Denied, she resumes her wild running.

Enter Jo Frost, Supernanny. Jo is not domestic help. She's more like a parental consultant who is up on the latest methods of psychologically correct child rearing. But her message to parents is in the bracing British tradition: You are in charge. You have to set rules. And there is a proper way for children to behave. Jo proceeds to give parents instruction in how to maintain a regular schedule, how to discipline, and how to get kids to eat their meals and go to bed. Ultimately, each week's episode ends happily, with peace and order restored. Still, the concluding moments of harmony are not enough to dispel the show's larger message: raising kids these days is hell.

To be sure, Supernanny is a reality show, not a depiction of reality. Presumably, the parents are chosen as hard cases and the kids are hellions straight out of central casting. But there is more than a little truth--and perhaps a shock of recognition--in the portrait of middle-class parents, insecure and bewildered about the basics of childrearing.

In Anxious Parents, a study of contemporary childrearing, historian Peter Stearns argues that today's parents are more worried about their own competence than parents in the past. This is not to say that parental worry itself is new, he notes. From fears over original sin to anxiety about sexuality to concerns about eating disorders, parents have always fretted over the state of their children's bodies and souls. But according to Stearns, there has been a drop in parental self-confidence in recent years. And along with it, he writes, lurks "a guilty suspicion that having children was not as satisfactory as had been expected."

According to other research, parents now see children as an obstacle to satisfaction in marriage. As American aspirations for emotional intimacy in marriage have grown, couples have come to see the presence of children, and the duties of child rearing, as threats to the achievement of that intimacy. A recent review of more than a hundred research studies found that parents were less happy with their marriages than nonparents. And this gap was greatest among the more affluent and younger groups.

Moreover, being a parent does not invite much social sympathy. Raising children is not as widely shared an experience as it once was. Fewer women are having children. The percentage of women over forty who have no children has nearly doubled in the past three decades. And those who do have children are having one or two, not three or four. Because of later marriage, smaller families, and longer lives, parents are dedicating a smaller proportion of their life to rearing children. Parenthood may be intense and all-consuming, but it is not the whole of life anymore. (This may explain why we now speak of child rearing as an activity--parenting--rather than as an adult life status--motherhood or fatherhood.)

Then, too, it is hard to be a parent when the mainstream consumer culture disfavors the virtues associated with the ordinary daily tasks of rearing children, such as sacrifice, patience, persistence, and faithful love. Nor does it help when the experience of parenthood is reduced to an economic calculation of unthinkably high dollar costs per child--implicitly suggesting that only the well-off can truly afford to be parents.

But, one place where parents do find refuge and strength is in their religious faith and communities. It is a sociological commonplace that religiously observant people are more likely to have children and to have more children. It is also the case that people who aren't particularly observant become more so, once they begin to raise children. Indeed, according to Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle (Basic Books), "faith is increasingly necessary as a motive to have children." It is not a mystery why this is so. Churches support parents and welcome children. For Catholics, the presence of children is pervasive: in the sacraments, in the Mass, and in the crying babies in the pews. And it is within the community of the faithful that parents hear a message radically at odds with the mainstream culture: Children are a gift from God.