Let me tell you something that only really clicked for me recently.
If you sit down with anyone who parented in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s, and ask them what they wanted for their children, the answers tend to sound similar. They wanted them to grow up. To be safe. To get a job. To be able to take care of themselves. To have children of their own one day. If you push a bit further, they might mention being decent, being useful, staying out of trouble.
Now ask the same question of a parent in 2026, and the answer sounds completely different. We say things like, “I just want them to be happy.” “I want them to know they’re loved.” “I want them to feel confident in themselves.” “I want them to feel emotionally safe.” “I want them to know they can do anything they set their mind to.”
Neither list is wrong. But they’re describing different jobs entirely. And a growing body of research suggests that this specific shift, from raising children to survive to raising children to be happy, is the biggest generational change in parenting the last hundred years has seen. Bigger than affection. Bigger than discipline. Bigger than the shift from stay-at-home mums to working mums.
This one’s the big one.
Where the shift actually came from
The anthropologist Robert LeVine spent decades studying parents in cultures all over the world. In a 1988 paper in New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, he laid out what he considered the three universal goals of parenting, in the order they naturally arise.
First, parents want their children to survive. Physical safety. Food. Basic health. Once that’s more or less taken care of, parents move to the second goal: economic self-sufficiency. They want their children to be able to earn a living, hold a job, feed themselves. And once that’s more or less taken care of, parents move to the third and final goal, which LeVine called cultural values. Everything else. Meaning. Purpose. Personal growth. Happiness. Self-expression.
LeVine’s argument was that this hierarchy is real, universal, and roughly the same everywhere humans exist. The difference between cultures, and between generations, is mostly about which level of the hierarchy people are focused on at any given time.
For most of human history, parents were stuck at level one. Children died a lot. In much of the world, up to a third of children didn’t make it to age five. Parenting was, in the most literal way, about keeping the child alive from one day to the next. There wasn’t much energy left for self-actualisation.
Even a hundred years ago, in Britain, infant mortality was still high enough that the survival goal was doing most of the heavy lifting for most families. Our great-grandparents, and in many cases our grandparents, were parenting in a world where children still died from things we don’t worry about anymore. Their parenting was shaped by that reality.
I came across a video recently that talks about this very subject – except it highlights how newer styles of parenting are causing parents to resent their children. It’s worth a watch:
What our parents and grandparents were actually doing
I want to give this a bit of texture, because I think we sometimes flatten previous generations into a caricature.
Our grandparents weren’t cold or unloving. Many of them adored their children. What they were doing was different from what we’re doing, though, because the emotional register wasn’t the point. The point was that the child got to adulthood in one piece, learned enough to make a living, and became a person who could contribute to the family and the community. Praise, if it happened, was for accomplishment, not for existing. Discipline, if it happened, was about producing a capable adult, not about protecting the child’s feelings.
This produced children who, on the whole, were competent. They knew how to be bored without falling apart. They could handle criticism. They didn’t expect life to be fair. They had, on average, lower expectations of what emotional life should look like, and higher tolerance for what it actually was.
There were costs. Some of the children raised this way carried real emotional wounds that only got named decades later. Some grew up not knowing how to say “I love you.” Some carried resentments they couldn’t quite process. But the goal, from the parent’s side, was mostly being met. The children survived. The children learned to work. The children raised their own children in turn.
A quick note before we go further
I want to pause here because this piece could easily be misread. I’m not writing this as a “kids these days” complaint, and I’m not writing it as an argument for going back to old-fashioned parenting. Some of what our grandparents did was genuinely harmful, and their children carried it for decades. If your childhood was one where the survival-focused parenting shaded into neglect, coldness, or emotional absence, this piece isn’t dismissing that. What I’m describing is a broader shift in what parents in most of the developed world are aiming for, not a suggestion that the old goal was better or that the new one is wrong. Both goals have real costs. This piece is about noticing them.
What we’re doing now
Modern parenting, in most developed countries, has moved almost entirely to LeVine’s third level. Survival is assumed. Economic security is assumed, at least to a degree that our grandparents couldn’t have imagined. What parents are now trying to produce, when they get down to it, isn’t just a child who makes it to adulthood or holds a job. It’s a child who feels good about being alive. Who has strong self-esteem. Who is emotionally regulated. Who can identify their feelings. Who has a rich inner life. Who is fulfilled.
The research on how much this has changed is substantial. In a 2025 study of intensive parenting in eleven countries published in Personality and Individual Differences, researchers documented how what sociologists call “intensive parenting” has become the dominant model in individualistic Western cultures. Intensive parenting is child-centred, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive. Parents are now held responsible for their child’s social, emotional, and educational success in ways that would have been unrecognisable a couple of generations ago. The parent isn’t just providing for the child anymore. The parent is orchestrating the child’s development.
And parents feel it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 4,000 American parents found that 70% believe being a mother today is more demanding than it was a few decades ago. 60% said the same about being a father. Two-thirds said parenting was harder than they’d expected it to be. Almost half described it as tiring “all or most of the time.” A third described it as stressful “all or most of the time.” And these numbers weren’t coming from parents who don’t love their kids. The same survey found that 87% described being a parent as the most, or one of the most, important aspects of who they are.
What we’ve gained, and what we’ve lost
Let me try to be honest about both sides of this.
We’ve gained a lot. Children in most developed countries today are less likely to be hit, less likely to be publicly humiliated, less likely to have their emotions dismissed, and more likely to grow up with parents who can actually name and respond to what they’re feeling. There’s a warmth in modern parenting that our grandparents would have found unimaginable, and it isn’t fake. It’s real, and it matters, and the children who grow up with it have access to something previous generations didn’t.
But we’ve also lost some things.
Children raised to be happy don’t always develop the skills for handling not being happy. Adversity, disappointment, boredom, being disliked, being wrong, being ordinary; these are all things every human eventually encounters, and modern parenting sometimes accidentally teaches children that these experiences shouldn’t happen. When they do happen, the child is often less prepared for them than a child raised on the survival model would have been. There’s a growing body of research on this specifically, connecting rising anxiety and depression in young adults to childhoods in which they were protected from the ordinary difficulty of being alive.
Modern parenting is also, and here’s the thing few people say out loud, exhausting in a way our grandparents’ parenting wasn’t. When your job is to keep the child alive and functional, you can log off at the end of the day. When your job is to orchestrate their emotional development, their self-esteem, their opportunities, their happiness, their identity, and their fulfilment, you never quite can. This is why so many modern parents are burned out, and it isn’t a personal failing. It’s a job description that’s actually impossible to complete.
Where this leaves us
I don’t think there’s a clean answer here. I don’t think we can, or should, go back to a survival-focused model. Even if we wanted to, the world doesn’t require it in the same way anymore.
But I think noticing the shift honestly is useful. Because a lot of what modern parents feel isn’t inadequacy or failure. It’s the strain of doing a job that our grandparents didn’t have to do, without a template for what “success” even looks like.
And maybe the answer, or at least a piece of it, is a bit of both. Enough attention to emotional wellbeing that children grow up knowing they’re loved. Enough exposure to ordinary difficulty that they can handle life when it doesn’t go their way. Enough parental presence to matter. Enough parental absence to let them develop their own competence.
Our grandparents got some of this right and some of it wrong. So will we.
But at least, when we’re honest about what job we’re actually doing, we can be a bit kinder to ourselves when it turns out to be harder than we expected.
Because it is harder. Not because we’re doing it wrong.
Because it’s a very different job.