Even before I ever had kids, I knew I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom if given the choice. I have always been career focused and taken pride in earning my own money. Plus, as much as I enjoy spending time with my kids and cherish my identity as a parent, I don’t want that to be my entire personality.

Now that I have kids, it would be impossible for me to be a stay-at-home mom because, like many families living in the big city, we simply couldn’t afford it. The cost of housing, food, gas and transit, daycare and extracurriculars, clothes and birthdays — the list goes on — often depends on households having two incomes.

Three to four decades ago, families in North America lived a very different reality. In the ’80s and ’90s, the average age of a first-time mom was around 25 years old. For some women, that meant they barely had a chance to start their careers before settling down and having a baby. The cost of living was also remarkably cheaper then. Families could have more kids and sustain everyone on less money. Society maybe felt a bit more family-friendly.

My mom worked as a career hair stylist before she had me, her firstborn, and hired a nanny so she could return to work until she had my sister. She returned to work again for a few more years before “retiring” and becoming a stay-at-home mom. And then my parents had one more kid, my baby sister, so she really did have her hands full at home.

With my dad working full-time and often travelling for his job, almost all of the childcare…

My toddler’s preschool is loudly nut-free. There’s a sign near the entrance. It’s written in uppercase letters in the parents’ handbook. And it’s reflected in the catered hot lunches they serve to students everyday. Nuts are even banned from gifts to teachers. Last winter holiday I tried very hard to find a box of assorted chocolates to give to staff (turns out almost all of them contain traces of peanuts), and ultimately had to settle for a box of cream-filled ones.

When I take my kids to indoor play centres, there’s almost always a sign at the door declaring it a “nut-free zone.” Schools, summer camps, community centres, and birthday party venues are also all nut-free.

It’s all for good measure: peanut allergies are one of the most common food allergies, affecting roughly 3 percent of kids in the U.S. And for some, an allergic reaction can cause life-threatening anaphylaxis, requiring use of an EpiPen and emergency medical attention. I know if one of my kids had even a slight allergy to something, having that food banned from their school would give me peace of mind.

However, the lengths we go to avoid nuts in shared spaces for kids nowadays makes me think about just how common nuts really were in my childhood, especially when it came to the everpresent peanut butter (and jelly) sandwich.

There are very few lunches I remember bringing to school when I was a kid. That wasn’t because my parents let me buy my lunch or return home midday; it’s that I had very little variety. On any given week, I’d open my Looney Tunes lunchbox and find either a bologna sandwich, a ham sandwich,…

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,…