Are Your Parenting Skills Better Than Those of Your Own Parents?
Ask anyone who has kids, and they'll tell you that more often than not, they're getting unsolicited advice from their own parents and they don't like it.
There's a new survey of 2,000 Americans commissioned by the online learning company Osmo that shows 76 percent of parents believe they're doing a better job than their own parents did. What's more, nearly as many – three in four – say it's harder to raise a kid nowadays than when their parents were doing it. As a mom of two teenagers, I'm gonna agree with that.
Another stat says nearly 80 percent said they wouldn't do to their kids some of the things their own parents did to them. Now, this is where mine and my husband's parents come into play. We totally implement a lot of what our parents did with us into our own parenting. I definitely agree with this: 46 percent say they don't condone spanking or the other forms of corporal punishment that their parents may have thought was useful. Yeah, there's no spanking or hitting in our home.
Oh, and a third of modern parents don't even fire off the old stand-by: "GO TO YOUR ROOM!" like our parents did to us growing up. Probably because going to your room these days means go spend 12 hours on your video games completely unplugged from the world.
And 41 percent say strict bedtimes have gone the way of the VHS tape, and 30 percent don't make their children sit at the dinner table until their plates are clean. I have to say, I do still make my kids finish their dinner before leaving the table. What can I say, I hate wasting food.
Modern parents certainly have to deal with screen time, which wasn't an issue back in the day. Sixty-eight percent say they try to enforce limits on it, but 71 percent say they wish they were more strict about enforcing them.
The struggle is real when it comes to this parenting topic. It is not an easy fight. In fact, the OnePoll survey revealed three in 10 parents don't regulate their kids' tablet use at all, 34 percent don't monitor the gaming device their kids use, and 32 percent don't monitor their gaming console usage. Yikes.