The Boogeyman of the Detached Millennial Mom

Millennial parents are more engaged than any previous generation, but maligned as "distant and detached."

Recently a Substack parenting article went semi-viral. The article was about detached and distant millennial parents, and how society has gone off the rails, “normalizing” horrendous things like sleep training, formula and day care starting at six weeks postpartum. I’m not going to link the article, mostly because I don’t want to subject an author to a brigade of negative comments, but I don’t even really need to, because this wasn’t the first time I saw this general take, and I was already planning on writing about this. Much like the oft-repeated (and completely untrue) claim that the “divorce rate is skyrocketing,” recent, modern parental detachment seems to be a hot subject for people who want to claim that everything is getting worse.

The problem is, at least when it comes to millennial parents, it’s just not true. You could argue that breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and practicing intensive attachment parenting is good (I might agree with some parts and disagree with others) but you can’t argue that recent parents are uniquely failing at this. In fact, millennial parents are probably the most attached, involved and present parents in modern history, or perhaps even in human history.

Some detractors might point out that they know “lots of parents” who make their babies cry it out for sleep training at two months old, who never attempted to breastfeed because they didn’t want to ruin their boobs, or who enroll their babies in 12-hour day care for no reason other than to get their nails done, so I’m wrong and this is a recent and dire emergency. And you know, I’m not going to argue with your “lived experience.” However, these parents are far from the norm. There’s just no statistic that supports this worldview. Any “bad” thing you can say about millennial parents was likely just as true, if not more true, of Gen X or boomer parents. And some of those things were even true of parents in the Middle Ages. Most children throughout history were raised in ways that would horrify parents today—the ones who are continually maligned as cold and detached.