I recently took my kids to an indoor playground, the kind with hard plastic tunnels, foamy ladders, and twisty slides that spit you into a colourful ball pit. Within 10 minutes of arriving at the venue (and immediately feeling overstimulated), I found myself army crawling through one of the tunnels just so I could follow my kids and fit through the maze.

I wasn’t the only parent squeezing through this play structure or wading through the ball pit that day. Almost every adult there was an active participant. And even parents who opted to have their feet firmly planted on the ground were mostly engaged with whatever their kids were doing.

If we’re at a park, my husband and I are pushing our kids on swings and driving Tonka trucks through the sandbox. At home, we’re ordering coffee and muffins from their make-believe cafe, making music on their toy piano and xylophone, and assembling whole cities with Magna Tiles and wooden train tracks. Nearly every hour that my kids are awake and not in daycare or preschool, we are playing with them. Yet I can’t recall a lot of times where either of my parents played like this with me.

My parents weren’t opposed to playing with us – well, maybe my dad was until we were old enough to partake in more “civilized” play like board games – but they weren’t actively trying to engage with our playtime every minute. Most parents in the ‘90 were like this. Some might call it “free range parenting,” while others might say it’s just letting kids figure it out themselves.

In the summer after breakfast was finished, my mom would simply open…

There’s a trend on TikTok where mothers rattle off a bunch of household and child-rearing tasks their husbands do on the regular: things like getting the kids dressed and making them breakfast in the morning, taking them to their doctor’s appointments, and not only doing loads of laundry, but folding the clothes and putting them all away. It ends with the punchline, “I didn’t marry a loser,” implying that doing these things should be the bare minimum.

Women married to guys not pulling their equal weight might be quietly reconsidering their life’s choices, but a lot of Millennial moms are likely nodding in agreement. Millennial men are arguably the most hands-on and involved dads of any generation so far. For one, the number of stay-at-home dads is on the rise (nearly 1 in 5 stay-at-home parents in the U.S. are dads), and even those working jobs outside the house spend triple the amount of time with their kids compared to previous generations.

Of course, fatherhood looked quite different in the ‘90s. Even though our dads were markedly more hands-on than their own, most of them never changed a diaper, shared parental leave with their partners, or volunteered to chaperone their kids’ school field trips. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, a lot of dads were still the sole breadwinners of their households, and housework and childcare was left to moms – whether they were stay-at-home moms or not.

That was the case in my family. My mom gave up her career shortly after she had my sister so that she could take care of us and most of the house work. Growing up, my mom did the majority of the…

On Valentine’s Day this year, I sent my toddler to preschool with little cards he had picked out at the drug store the weekend before. I helped him write the names of everyone in his class, he scribbled on the cards using crayons, and we stuck heart stickers on the envelopes.

But when my child came home from school that day and we emptied his small backpack, I was floored by what I saw: high-quality solid milk chocolates, handwritten cards, and red and pink loot bags filled with small toys, boxes of crayons and mini tubs of Play-Doh. Many parents had really gone above and beyond what I’d expect in a preschool class, and for better or worse, this might just be the new norm?

In the weeks leading up to any holiday, mom-fluencers on social media are often yapping about how to make things “extra special” for kids – whether it’s “boo baskets” for Halloween (as if trick or treating wasn’t enough), “love baskets” filled with cinnamon hearts and heart-shaped Jellycat stuffies for Valentine’s Day, or Easter baskets that include big presents like a new bike or scooter. I can appreciate wanting to make holidays whimsical for our kids, but overachieving parents really make the rest of us look (and feel) bad.

Without the pressures of social media, ‘90s parents didn’t have to worry about these sorts of things. Like most kids, my siblings and I got presents – Polly Pockets and Tamagotchis, Lisa Frank stationary and Koosh balls – at Christmas and birthdays. We brought homemade cupcakes made with Betty Crocker cake mix to school on our birthdays, and gave out loot bags with the typical dollar-store stuff,…

Whenever we take our kids out to restaurants, half of my bag is usually filled with stuff to entertain them. Crayons and paper, stickers, Hot Wheels cars, fidget spinners, and a pre-meal snack – anything to keep toddlers cheerful and calm. Apparently, dining out in a bustling eatery full of noise, different smells, the dizzying dance of servers and patrons, and sometimes even TVs blaring sports games is not enough to “entertain” children.

Sometimes, if service is slow and dinner goes longer than usual, my husband or I will begrudgingly cue up an episode of Blippi or Bluey on one of our phones. That always buys us just enough time to down our drinks, pay up, and gather every toy and crayon that’s fallen under the table. Plus, are they truly iPad kids if they’re not watching it on an iPad?

Of course, going to restaurants in the ‘90s looked very different. For one, there was a smoking section that was barely partitioned from the rest of the dining room. But also, parents never packed anything to “entertain” us at the table, and if we really wanted to bring something along – a book or maybe a small notepad and some crayons – it was up to us to carry it ourselves.

Like so many family restaurants today, some offered crayons with the kids’ menu. Then, there was a whole trend in the late ‘90s where restaurants would cover their dining tables in brown Kraft paper and servers would introduce themselves by writing their name on the table in crayon. (Here’s looking at you, Romano’s Macaroni Grill!)

Meanwhile, fast-food joints in the ‘90s swung to the other side of the…

Almost every parent has a similar memory: buckling their tiny newborn into a car seat, walking out of the hospital to the parked car, and carefully securing the car seat into its base in one of the back seats. Driving home with your baby – whether it was 10 minutes away or an hour – felt like the most nerve-wracking ride of your life.

I remember picking out the car seat that would carry our babies safely home. My husband and I did a bunch of research online, asked friends and family for recommendations, went to a speciality baby store to see the various makes and models in person, and watched a YouTube video to confirm we had, in fact, installed the rear-facing car seat correctly.

Following all these steps felt like an important rite of passage into parenthood. After all, if we weren’t taking our child’s car safety seriously, what else would we let slide?

Born to Drive – Or At Least Sit in the Front Seat

Times sure were different growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Of course, my parents brought me home from the hospital in an infant car seat, and they buckled that car seat into the back seat of their car. But that’s where the commonalities seem to end.

For one, it’s questionable whether my car seat even had a five-point harness, and it was padded with extra blankets and a ruffly pink skirt (to signal to other cars that I was a girl, of course). My car seat was about as unsafe as an ‘80s crib, which was filled with blankets, lined around the edges with a pillowy bumper, and a Fisher-Price Busy…